Saturday Newsbreak: 8/18

A new weekly feature that I’m starting on this blog is my short take on some interesting (to me) stories out there, not in any particular order of importance. Nor do I plan to be comprehensive about “covering the news”. So, here goes….

--Much is being made in Gainesville of University of Florida football coach Urban Meyer’s recent statement to the press that (referring to his team) “we stink!”. But Gainesville Sun sports writer Pat Dooley (one of my favorites in the paper) noted that other coaches are doing essentially the same thing: openly criticizing their own teams before the media, apparently to get them to focus harder on coming together in preparation for the season, which for the Gators begins on September 1. But I think most of us take the criticisms with that in mind, and not as the coaches’ true sentiments. I’m looking forward to an exciting football season this year, with Florida hopefully being able to play for the Southeastern Conference championship at year’s end. I’m also hoping that Florida State and Miami can recover from their disappointing seasons last year and resume being the nationally-recognized powerhouses that they’ve been over the past few decades.

--Tropical Storm Erin just hit the southern Texas coast, and now the main forecasts have Hurricane Dean plowing into the same area in the middle of next week. It looks, at least at this point, like the western Gulf of Mexico is getting the same kind of “attention” that Florida received in 2004 with its four hurricanes.

--Arupa Freeman (a local advocate for the homeless) wrote a compelling piece in the editorial section of the August 17 Gainesville Sun about Gainesville’s recently-adopted policies against the homeless, which include evictions from public lands and anti-panhandling ordinances. She decries these actions and others, although the article’s title, “Gainesville’s reign of terror against the homeless”, is a bit on the melodramatic side. Freeman brings out a lot of information in the article, nevertheless, and if you can find a copy of it, I’d recommend you read it as well, for its message can apply to any other community in the nation. She correctly points out that some of Gainesville’s homeless have criminal records, which simultaneously makes them pariahs as homeless people and unable to get a decent job that could pull them out of their situation. Many of their crimes were drug-related. I don’t rightly understand why we have to force those who have been convicted of a crime to have the infraction “stamped” on them the rest of their lives, even after they have served the legally-prescribed penalty for it. This is a national-level problem that can only be solved through national leaders (or grass-roots leaders attaining national status). And our nationwide policy of processing mentally ill people through institutions and spitting them out onto the streets is, to me, nothing short of barbaric (I guess I’m starting to get a little melodramatic, too)!

--I saw Presidential candidate and Illinois Senator Barack Obama on C-Span the other day, speaking and answering questions outdoors somewhere in one of the three “pampered” states that perennially seem to be sites of the early campaigns. After hearing him, I came to the stunning realization that I agreed with everything that he said! I still think that Hillary Clinton would be a O.K. President and has been unfairly vilified in some parts of the media, but Obama has something that I see is invaluable to being a truly effective President that I don’t see in any of the candidates from either party (Republican Mike Huckabee is the only one coming close): he is a great communicator, in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. Some have added Bill Clinton to that list, but I think that Obama is better than him at both persuading and even exciting an audience.

--It's dismaying to see the deaths and casualties accruing from the efforts made to rescue the trapped miners in the collapsed Utah mine. Don't we have technology available to supply each miner with a tracking or homing device that would make it much simpler to find them in the event of an accident like this? The last thing rescuers need is to spend any more time than is absolutely necessary down there looking for people.