I was given a first round of repairs estimate that was a little over $700. I asked again how confident they were this would cover the primary issues, and reiterated my unwillingness to put any more than that tops into this vehicle. Here the exchange got combative and defensive. They even accused me of trying to lure them into a trap. What? I’m just trying to get a thorough and honest assessment of what I’m looking at here. I should have walked away right then and there.

But, I let them do the repairs, which was replacing the Oxygen Sensors and a coil, and surprise, surprise, another $600+ worth of repairs would be needed. My vehicle had a clogged catalytic converter that was melting oxygen sensors, pretty bad damage, which all totaled would come out to around $1,400 worth of work, well over what I said up front would be past my willingness to invest. Here’s the thing, I researched what would make an oxygen sensor melt (these things are metal) and consulted other mechanics. The issue is rare and the only thing that would have caused it is a bad catalytic convertor. I am entirely convinced this place knew I wouldn’t pay for the full repairs, so they feigned ignorance of the total issue so as to at least put me on the hook for $700.

My wife went in and paid for the car because I was so irate that to have further personal contact with these people would come to no productive good. They tried to tell her that the vehicle without the work would overheat and possibly catch fire if we tried to drive it away. In truth, the vehicle made it several miles without so much as an engine light and ran smoother than it had in years. On top of that, the mechanic offered to have a “friend” take the damaged vehicle off our hands for us because it was a shame we weren’t going to finish fixing it. I’m not even sure that is legal.

I’m sure the vehicle needs the work, but at every step I felt like I was taken for a ride and fed lines of untruths all along the way. My experience seems to mirror others as well, do yourself a favor, go find a AAA endorsed mechanic and steer clear of this place entirely.

On a positive note, I recommend 100% Tibbitts Auto Repair in Winter Park, FL. Randy and his team have always been thorough, honest and take the time to explain the repairs clearly. I’ve used them for years and recommend them every chance I get. It’s rare to find a mechanic you trust, and I only wish I was close enough to his shop when the above experience went down to have my work done there.

Wait. Before you launch a DoS attack on my blog, unfriend me or grab the pitchforks, hear me out.

On 9/11/2001, Americans showed their best side, exemplified unity, exuded compassion and rose above trivial differences. But on 9/12/2001 and every day since Americans have done the opposite, to extreme degrees. We’ve regressed into a hateful and dysfunctional band of louts who justify everything we do, including conducting multiple wars and destroying personal freedom among our citizens, under the banner of victimhood.

I say this not from some self-installed position high atop a moral pedestal, but from squarely within the midst of that band of louts. I bought into every ounce of the chest thumping, kill ‘em all attitude that ran rampant in the days after 9/11. I was angry and I wanted revenge. This was my generation’s Pearl Harbor and, goddammit, we were going to do all those “towelheads” in. One evening in particular sticks in my mind.

I was out at a sports bar with a few friends and two men walk in of what appeared to be Arabic descent. I recall remarking to our table that it was disrespectful for them to be in here. Not in here toasting the fall of the towers, or in here saying America had it coming, but just plainly and simply being in public. I’m not sure what it is I thought they should be doing, I’m guessing being holed up in their house in fear of some drunk American kicking their ass. At that point in time, that was a reasonable assertion. I recall several people telling me I was an ignorant fool and I tried to justify my stance, using the victim card in some kind of manner. I was plainly and simply being an asshole in the first degree.

One good thing did come of that, it forced me to look in the mirror and assess what I was thinking and the kind of person I was becoming as a result of wallowing in “victimhood”. I was letting irrationality and hate dictate my thought process. I was making prejudice, something I was so firmly against when it came to any other people, perfectly fine for Arabs. The problem is, there are way too many people who went down that rabbit hole like me and never came back out. I don’t know how scientific and representative of people’s dispositions comment threads online are, but if they are at all, then we as a nation are after 10 years still firmly trenched in blind rage and hate. We’re still the victims. We’re still assholes in the first degree.

So when I think about “what I was doing on 9/11″ or “how has 9/11 changed you” it makes me think of where I was mentally in the aftermath, and how it did change me for a period of time. It makes me ill. And, though I was able to change my way of thinking, it’s 10 years later and still too many of my fellow Americans remain locked into this blanket hatred justified by their victimhood.  How can you not be ashamed of that? When I see the speeches and the moments of silence, the chunks of destroyed building being installed at firehouses thousands of miles away from New York City… I can’t help but think that what I am seeing is a renewal of our victimhood so we can justify our being a a bunch of hateful louts.

Like I said, we were at our best on 9/11/2001, undeniably. We should celebrate the bravery and selflessness of so many people on that day, without question. But I feel like we do ourselves a disservice to not mourn the following day when we began the journey that still continues of losing ourselves to hate.

Collective Bargaining: It’s why Rudy got to play.

The Colonists, government employees of the British Crown, were unhappy with the money increasingly being deducted from their pay. Additionally, they felt it was unfair they were not given a voice in the governance of the Colonies. They had no seat at the table and their boss was reducing how much their hard work and toil would let them bring home to their families at the end of the day.

Additionally, the Colonial management was mistreating the Colonists, forcing them to board troops in their homes and harassing them in the streets, eventually a violent scuffle in Boston would break out over these episodes of employer harassment.

So the Colonists formed the Constitutional Congress so they could meet as a group of Colonial workers, put down their grievances in writing and submit their demands to their employer. It was only through this union of the 13 colonies that they had the strength to collective bargain for fair treatment and pay and the ability to have a say in the venture they worked so hard on.

This Declaration was met with armed resistance by the Crown, who said the law was on their side and that the Colonists had no right to this union and their demands.

Our founders were the epitome of unionized labor coming together to collectively bargain with their shared strength and petition on their own behalf. It was so important to them that after breaking off entirely from Britain and faced with the task of framing their own new government, that the very first amendment that they thought important to write down was as follows:

First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The ability to unionize and collectively bargain is strictly protected against the government by our most heralded and precious of commandments. The viewpoint and stance of our country’s founders is so very clearly written down for us to reference.

The Republican Party and Tea Party Movement, who both so vehemently oppose unions, constantly remind us our founders had all the answers and are whose examples we should be strictly adhering to. I humbly submit that they are the ones in need of reminding of those points now.

In addition to food stamp money, about 57,000 people receive an average of about $237. each month in cash assistance. “It’s a good chance for us to review our own operations and we found, so far, that there’s not really a problem here,” said Joe Follick, Communications Director for the Florida Department of Children and Families.

Follick told WDBO that the informal review by DCF found that less than one half of one percent of welfare benefit debit card funds are being withdrawn at casino ATM’s. Still, half a percentage point adds up to as much as $8 million a year. Follick said there’s no evidence that the money is being used to gamble.

The part that made my spidey sense go off originally was that if $8 million was 0.4% (the highest amount that could be less than one half of a percent) of the whole of dispersed cash allotments ($57,000 * $237 average * 12 months), that would mean the state of Florida gives out $2 trillion dollars annually. I was pretty sure that wasn’t the case.

So, I commented on the article at WDBO’s site, just under the first comment of someone who obviously loves Ronald Reagan but hates basic math, with the following:

I’m a little confused how they got their $8 million number. Less than a half a percent, let’s go with 0.4% of 57,000 people receiving an average $237 each month for 12 months = $648,432.

So, maybe instead of trumping up numbers about how much poor people are bilking out of the system, we should look into how many real millions and billions wealthy individuals and corporations are robbing us from? Like, maybe say, your poster boy Rick Scott for example?

So after talking with my wife about it, she figured out how WDBO got their $8 million number. They just multiplied by 5% instead of less than a half a percent, which is more than 10 times the amount! So she submitted this comment (decidedly less incendiary than my own):

57,000 people x 237 = 13,509,000
13,509,000 x 12 months = 162,108,000
162,108,000 x .004 = 648,432

But = 162,108,000 x.05 = 8,105,400

Looks like someone doesn’t know the difference between 5% and “less than half a percent” .4 % (.004)

She also contacted DCF who was quoted by WDBO in the article and their press liaison took the reporters name. In addition she contacted the WDBO program director to point out the error. To date there has been no correction, and the obvious error still remains.

It’s been a day and neither of our comments have been accepted by WDBO, although another comment from someone who mirrors their world view has been accepted. Big surprise, they cherry pick their comments. Keep in mind, this station purports itself to be a news agency, yet they report with obvious errors, ignore corrections when brought to their attention, and only allow commentary from the public to appear by people who support one extreme political ideology. Keep this in mind when you hear anything WDBO reports in the future. Everything is suspect.

Illustration by S. Kelly

Hometown News, the local paper I receive in North Brevard County reported recently that “Brevard County state legislators strongly favor creating a law in Florida similar to the Arizona law that would authorize police to verify the status of anyone who might be in the country illegally.” The following is my Letter the the Editor I submitted in response:

In regards to Brevard County state legislators desire to introduce a bill to create an immigration law reminiscent of the one passed in Arizona, I’d like to offer up the following points to the discussion.

Of the 18,537,969 Floridians responding in the last census, 21% are hispanic. That’s 3,892,974 legal citizens of these United States.  The most recent estimates of the state’s illegal alien population put it just under 1 million.  So for every illegal immigrant this law is meant to catch and remove from the country, 4 US citizens will have their civil rights trampled, being forced to carry a level of identification above and beyond what those of non-hispanic races would. Keep in mind that a driver’s license is no indication or proof of immigration or legal status. What we are talking about is carrying around birth certificates and passports in your home state, which is not only offensive for a free citizen of the United States of America, but puts people at incredibly increased risk of identity theft. Identity theft is an over 50 billion dollar problem in the US annually and can destroy the lives of it’s victims. It is common advice that things like social security cards, passports and birth certificates should be kept locked up and secured until you absolutely need them.

We should also take into account the percentage of the over 80 million visitors we see annually that are hispanic. Let’s give the economic impact of illegal immigrants figure of $3.7 billion the benefit of the doubt. Let’s also keep in mind this number is 2.2% of ALL Florida state and local expenditures in 2009 ($169 billion), not a large amount of where our tax dollars go at all. If the affect on our tourism is to turn away just 5.5 percent of the $68 billion tourism brought in during 2009 with these proposed laws, then we have already lost more than illegal immigration is purported to be costing our state in the first place.

I completely agree that illegal immigration is a violation of law and should be addressed, but mirroring the terrible approach Arizona has taken in Florida is the wrong solution. So what is the solution?  Let’s take a step back and understand the problem first. A novel thought, I know, but stick with me.

The types of documentation we are wanting illegal immigrants to hold is H-2A visas, for temporary agricultural workers, or H-2B visas, for non-agricultural workers (hospitality, tourism, construction…) Only 66,000 H-2B visas are even allowed to be given out each year, it should be noted. These visas are actually the responsibility of the employer to pay for and obtain, not the worker. The process by which the system was designed to work is the employer would put out a call for workers anticipating a shortfall of labor for an upcoming season. The employer must show that they have made an attempt to hire U.S. workers first and provide favor to hiring them over immigrant labor (this must be proven via documented advertising.) Only then can they apply for visas 45 days in advance for the foreign workers they have recruited. It is not the case that a worker from Mexico goes to some immigration office, pays a fee and then comes in to go looking for work.

What is happening is that employers are not obeying the laws and not following these procedures. They have instead created a situation where the immigrant labor must risk their life and risk imprisonment so that the employers can save themselves the cost and hassle of doing things the legal way. They do not recruit the labor in Mexico and then work out the paperwork to get them here as they are supposed to. For every illegal immigrant working in this country, there is an employer who has committed several crimes, including immigration violations, tax evasion and violations of wage and workers’ compensation laws. In other words, for every illegal they employ an employer has committed multiple federal crimes.  We are talking about organizations that are responsible for a laundry list of multiple violations… yet we are more concerned with a single visa violation by an individual.  This is the area we feel we need to focus legislative action, not the employers committing serial violations on a massive scale, but the victims of their crimes. Given this I have to question either the motivations or the intelligence of those wishing to place the immigrant, not the employer, in the primary responsible party role.

If you truly believe in tackling our immigration issues you will put 100% of your efforts, that is every last bit of it, on forcing employers to comply with the law. Punishing the victims of their actions is ignorant and cruel. And if you believe in the fundamentals of citizenship in a free and just country governed by the rule of law, you cannot support the sacrifice of the civil rights and security of legal citizens based on their appearance. And finally, if you have any sense of economic reason you cannot justify taking actions that will needlessly damage the financial well being of our state in an already precarious time.

I think what disturbs me most about our legislators contemplating such a dangerous and ill conceived notion as these immigration laws is that I, just a common working man seems to have put a heck of a lot more thought into the issue from multiple angles than they have. I wasn’t elected to spend my entire day researching and developing legislation that makes sense and serves the better interests of Floridians, they were. With all due respect, in that light they are extraordinarily horrible at their jobs.

- Reduce property taxes, you know, that thing that started Florida’s budget issues well before the recession (we had a head start getting used to it over the rest of the states.) It worked so damn well when Christ did it, so let’s just do it some more and really put our nuts in a vise! We don’t need the money anyhow, because we aren’t coughing up any jack to pay for anything useful for the citizenry anymore.

- Eliminate the Florida corporate income tax, which works nicely with giving residents a token decrease in property tax. Nobody could say he only cut taxes for businesses! Considering the fact that Florida is already one of the most attractive states tax wise for businesses, further reducing state income by 100% eliminating the taxes they receive is not only unnecessary but reckless. Does he plan on holding bake sales to raise money? Oh wait, I forgot, we won’t have any services, so who needs money? This one could get sticky. Rick Scott seems hell bent on convincing the Tea Baggers that he’s a populist but I’m not sure how he would answer a likely question they might propose of why he doesn’t want to nix 100% of personal property tax and give the smaller reduction to corporate taxes. I’m sure the answer will be something about trickle down economics, he’ll say 3 “Hail Reagans” and every one will be satisfied though.

- Removing corporate regulations… yeah, in the wake of Wall Street and banks raping the entire country (a direct result of Greenspan’s failed theory of a unregulated market) and oil giant BP ignoring what little safety regulations they did have to end up polluting the Gulf of Mexico, Rick Scott wants us to loosen up the reins even more. What’s that saying about doing the same thing and expecting a different result?

I’m not even going to go too much into his support for the completely racist and unconstitutional immigration law they have hatched in Arizona. How he thinks he can hold that opinion in Florida, a state that is populated by hispanic and hispanic-looking people (hell, even half the whites in Florida are tan enough to pass), and get elected is beyond me.

So yeah, Rick Scott is pretty much mentally insane, or maybe just a corporate whore, or maybe an experienced and seasoned douchebag. I’ll let him pick which we should know him as.

Since in office President Obama has signed legislation that has lifted the ban on concealed weapons in federal parks and opened up oil drilling off the Eastern seaboard and Alaska. The healthcare markets that replace the public option in the now passed Health Reform Bill is essentially the same proposal Nixon had floated. Iran and North Korea, the axis of evil conservatives assured us Obama would be kowtowing to, are furious with Obama’s nuclear stance. I imagine they are angry because the conservatives had all but assured them Obama would be helping them build their nuclear arsenal himself. In reality he has passed more legislation that supports the conservative agenda than either Bush presidencies. If he has been alienating anyone it’s the far left. The ones people purport that he is beholden to in reality have the most to be disgruntled about.

Even the more recent talk about a national sales tax in lieu of increasing funding through income tax channels is more in line with the philosophy of the Fair Tax. That piece of well thought out conservative legislation, which used to be centerpiece of the Libertarian Party platform, seems to have been all but forgotten in the fervor to demonize Obama. Here is a President that has shown a clear ability to not be afraid of big changes if the numbers and the plans indicate a likely chance of success. Given the complete cowardice of all but a few Republicans to risk stepping out on the Fair Tax ledge, Obama is probably the best chance that bill has of getting passed. If conservatives would just stop calling him Hitler long enough to hold a sane dialog and pitch their plans like adults they may find him more open to supporting their ideas than many of their own party leaders.

Everything in the conservative world has taken a backseat to the goal of preventing our President from accomplishing anything productive. They will not be supportive of anything he does, even if it aligns with their own previously stated goals, which should immediately be signaling alarms in your head. If it is not his actions they hate so vehemently, then what is it? We should all think very honestly about that question and come to terms with the true ugliness that applying Occam’s Razor in this situation implies.

Pay to Play? Brevard County considers elimination of free parking at public beaches and boat ramps.

Look, we all pay taxes so that we can provide a lot of things for each other, some we personally might use right now, some we don’t. It’s part of living in an organized community, and if you get right down to it, the entire reason we have them in the first place. If not, why have a county at all? Why not just go live on your sequestered compound somewhere and let the surrounding area descend into anarchy? It just sounds to me like instead of finding ways to make us pay more for less services (because let’s be clear, they are not simultaneously proposing a drop in everyone’s tax rate) they ought to be working to find creative ways to be more cost effective and create new revenue streams, just like every other resident is having to do right now. Just slapping a meter on services we already are taxed for is a failure of problem-solving.

• You aren’t a licensed plumber (ie: you either aren’t a plumber at all or are operating illegally)
• You don’t pay your taxes on time
• You lied (your own admission) that the company you plan to buy would make anywhere near the $250,000 that was the basis of your whole 15 minutes of fame. (And news flash everyone, you pay taxes on taxable income after expenses and deductions are calculated)

I’m partially convinced you were just a political plant, or maybe you acted on your own, in which case you are pretty much just Ohio’s version of the B-Face girl.

Let me save you some trouble man, don’t run.  Just being “Joe The Plumber” has dug up enough surface facts for people to ascertain that you are a lying, tax owing and possibly illegally operating plumber. In a political campaign you would be turned to swiss cheese.  You aren’t “everyman”.  The people I know work hard, are licensed and aren’t off by hundreds of thousands of dollars when they forecast income.

And McCain, there are a lot of other occupations that struggle waaaaay more than plumbers, so you latching on to plumbers like they are the poopsmiths of the American workforce just shows how truly out of touch with the world you want to govern you are. Plumbers make good jack and EVERY person has a toilet, shower and sink they can’t live without. You should have used one of any of the thousands of other people already making less than a plumber who have aready lost their jobs as your example. But, I know, it’s tough to find the time to bother paying attention to things like what the hell is actually going on when you have so much Mavericking to do and all.