Our View: A worthy tradition

Sunday, 9/11/11, was indeed a tough day.

Surely, you tuned in to one of the many, many 9/11 specials on television. Or you read one or more of the multitude of stories and essays in newspapers. And at one point during any of these, your emotional well began to flow. Tears. Quivering chin. Clenched jaw. Tightened throat … as you fought back the grief and relived that day through the personal narratives of that awful, awful act of terror and murder.

Sept. 11, 2001, always will hold a special place on Longboat Key — because of this little town’s role in the day’s events. But what makes that day even more poignant here are the flags placed along Gulf of Mexico Drive. Spawned by the Longboat Key Chamber of Commerce, members of the town’s public works department on the day before 9/11 places one flag in the ground the entire length of the Key for each of the 2,977 victims who died in New York City, at the Pentagon and in Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pa.
The flags are so much greater than their size. Although they represent one life lost, you can’t help but think of the overwhelming grief that rippled from the deaths of each of those 9/11 victims — the husbands, wives, children, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, co-workers and communities. All of these people carrying for 10 years the memory and hurt unjustly inflicted upon them and the 9/11 victims.

We appreciate this tradition on Longboat Key — a small but richly meaningful way for us never to forget. Thanks, public works.

+ Calm before the storm(s)
To use the clichés: These “dog days” of September are playing out as another typical September on Longboat Key — the calm before the storm, literally and figuratively.

This September is typical in that, economically, it has been so far, as Jim Seaton, owner of Longboat Limousine, recently put it: “Crummy like all Septembers.” No more or no less crummy. Just typically crummy.

The good news is we have so far avoided hurricanes. Just two-and-a-half months to go. (Unfortunately, that’s still plenty of time for a lot to happen, as those of us who lived through 2004 remember — Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne spun through and up the Gulf Coast in 40 days.)

So let’s hope this September lull is not the literal calm before the storm.

Figuratively, September often is the calm before the next Town Hall storms. Town commissioners by law take a hiatus in August. But when they reconvene again this month to adopt the fiscal 2011-2012 budget, that will trigger the start of addressing an agenda full of issues that continue to linger and, as only on Longboat Key, are guaranteed to be contentious. A sampling:

• A cell-phone tower proposal for the north end.

• The proposed Publix redesign and redevelopment.

• The town and Longboat Key Club and Resort’s continuing legal battles with the Islandside Property Owners Coalition.

• The town’s pension problems.

• And, watch for this: increasing tension between town commissioners and Town Manager Bruce St. Denis.

Let’s not forget, either:
• The fate of the Colony Beach & Tennis Resort is expected to be decided later this month, with the owners association selecting a developer. We can count on that becoming yet another controversy to be added to the list of unresolved disputes there.

• Likewise expect some additional news on the fate of the Whitney Beach Plaza.
Enjoy this calm. But be assured: As longtime Longboaters know, although September may be calm and crummy, the other 11 months of the year always seem, as the weather saying goes, to “pack a punch.”

+ Perry and Ponzi
The Northeast and media elites just can’t stand that Texas swagger. That raw, rough-edged, tell-it-like-it-is honesty that’s as native to Texans as cotton and cowboy boots.

We love it.

And we love that he had the chutzpah to call Social Security what it really is: The biggest legalized Ponzi scheme in all of history.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry told a Tampa radio station Monday he wasn’t the first to call Social Security (and Medicare, as well) a Ponzi scheme. But he was the first national politician to have the guts to do so.

It is. It’s a scam. In fact, it’s worse than a Ponzi scheme. As the Reason Foundation notes, Social Security is worse than a Ponzi scheme for three reasons:

1) A Ponzi scheme collects money from new investors and uses it to pay previous investors — minus a fee. Social Security collects money from new investors (working taxpayers), uses some of it to pay previous investors and spends the surplus on programs for politically favored groups — minus the cost of supporting a massive bureaucracy.

Since its startup, trillions upon trillions of dollars have been spent on these groups and bureaucrats. There’s no trust-fund lock box.

2) Participation in a Ponzi scheme is voluntary. Social Security participation is required by force of law, at the point of a gun. The government automatically takes your money out of your paycheck and “invests” it.

3) A Ponzi scheme eventually collapses when its perpetrators can’t con enough new investors to pay its previous investors. Social Security, on the other hand, may worry about running out of investors, but it always has a trump card: It can raise your taxes.

Perry was being gentle when he called Social Security a Ponzi scheme. It’s Ponzi-plus. Legalized looting.

EXCERPT...

Normally, we concern this page with local issues, but this recently caught our attention — in a Sept. 8 commentary by Michael Ledeen on the Pajamas Media website. Ledeen is a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“We are in the midst of a global religious expansion that goes hand in hand with a widespread political uprising against oppression and corruption.

“It is commonly assumed that the most dynamic faith in the global revival is militant Islam, but it isn’t. The blue ribbon goes to American-style evangelical Christianity.

“You might not know, for example, that a leading Chinese government economist recently wrote a famous study of market economies, in which he concluded that successful capitalist countries have successful churches, and thus that China should embrace religious organizations.

“As two sharp-eyed British journalists note in their recent book, ‘God is Back,’ (Evangelical) Christianity is booming in the People’s Republic (and most everywhere else Christians are free to practice their faith), and the Chinese Constitution has actually been amended to make room for it …

“So when we hear the leaders of the American establishment declare war on the tea partiers, we would do well to remember that such movements are deeply embedded in our national DNA, that those establishment types owe their own status to such a movement, that the dreams of the tea partiers are shared not only by millions of American voters, but by freedom-seeking peoples in some unexpected places, and that it is no accident to discover that a global movement in the name of freedom coincides with a global great awakening, with roots in America and its unique revolutionary tradition.”