Carl Hiaasen The Miami Herald

October 26, 2009

Carl Hiaasen
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, Florida 33132-1693

RE: “Lawmakers Love Affair with Big Oil” – Some comments on your article about how important the vertical smile and the horizontal tango can be when legislation is on the line. Also, tu quoque makes a triumphal return.

Mr. Hiaasen,

If it weren’t for the hugely successful mercantile firm of Scrooge & Marley, a firm whose social benefits such as providing capital for Victorian “shovel ready” projects were almost incalculable and the lachrymose travails of the youngest Cratchit, Trollope rather than Dickens would have been the most popular 19th century English novelist.

I say that because Trollope was known for his devoted attention to quotidian minutiae. Thus, when I read “especially after what happened to the shore lines of Louisiana and Mississippi when Katrina struck”, I asked myself if I missed something.

Maybe Katrina was a foreclosure avenger with John Edwards’s mortgage company. Maybe she was a pox-filled pole dancer. Maybe she was both; maybe she was neither. Either way you imply that the major damage to Louisiana and Mississippi was either caused or exacerbated by drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Not so, dear chap, not so.

I am not sure why you exclude Texas, Alabama, and Florida from your hydrocarbon death march. Maybe, if Kanye West is right and George Bush really doesn’t like Black people, he directed the storm to those states because more Blacks lived there. I don’t know.

I do know that I have taken the littoral route 5 times to visit my granddaughters in Texas.

The biggest amount of petroleum damage that I saw was caused when a storage battery came off its foundation and dumped 5000 gallons of heating oil into a New Orleans suburb. The facility would have been there whether or not production platforms were in the Gulf.

[I confess to depleting the ozone layer, drowning polar bears, and hurrying up the coming end days of Global Warming, a crisis that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown says we have 41 days left to solve or we will all die, by driving my gas guzzling SUV back and forth. The only remotely political statement I made was to avoid all commercial contact with any CITGO gas stations and 7/11 pit stops. You should do the same what with your journalist credentials, shouldn’t you?]

You comment on lobbyists being married to state legislators as if it were a reason for automatic disqualification of either or both. I don’t suppose full exploitation or denial of the rights of consortium should be a discloseable matter on an ethics form. Should video evidence of wretched excess be required?

I suggest a trip up to the Broward County Board of Education and the Broward County Commission to examine the full uses of marital persuasion. The most in shape thing there is the world famous Broward Bearded Clam. I am told that there are more Federal agents, agents being defined as sworn officers with badges, guns, subpoenas, in Broward County per capita than any other county in the United States. As an émigré from Hudson County, New Jersey that wounds my civic pride. Up there public crooks were crooks whether they got any QMT [Quality Mattress Time] or not.

Down here it would take a Dante to unravel the interlocking directorates and limbs.

There is a Broward County Commissioner who uses her married name when she lobbies in Tallahassee. A special award goes to the member of the Board of Education whose husband got a $500,000 contract over which she had direct influence. She got the award not for double dealing self interest but rather for saying with a straight face and without wetting her pants that she knew nothing about it. As to the former what name does her husband call out at the magic moment? As to the latter what do they talk about at night if not about $500,000?

One of the benefits of being a modern American Liberal is the gift of “eclectic indignation”. It is genetically implanted at birth.

Pillow talk of lobbyists and legislators is not limited to Florida.

The champion was Senator Tom Daschle [D-SD]

When he was majority leader of the United States Senate his wife was the chief lobbyist for Boeing. One year she made $3,500,000. That’s three and a half million dollars. Do you think they ever talked about planes the United States Air Force would buy? How about the Navy?

I rather imagine the reason he was about as heavy as Gandhi was because she had him on a Viagra IV with Cialis in the inhaler. She got perfect tens from all the judges, including the hard to please Bulgarian judge, for her Viennese Butterfly. The poor worn out Dakota dude would beg for mercy. He would vote to give Boeing the contract for Santa’s sleigh to get a good night’s rest.

One solution for the Save our Shores lobbying group, a group whose chief arm twister is named Ned Ludd, is at hand.

I have been asking the Miami Herald since 1997 to turn off the air conditioning at world HQ by the bay.

Think of the consequences of the act.

It would shame other businesses into following their courageous lead. The citizens of Florida, particularly those moronic nit-wits who concern themselves with returning to the good old days of the pre-industrial era, would buy three of your papers every day. You could afford to retire those poor matadors who daily dodge cars in our intersections to sell your paper. You could retire them with an indexed pension and a full benefit package. That’s

The next time you lower the thermostat you become an accomplice in environmental rapine.

Half the electricity in this country is generated by coal burning utilities.

2/3rds of the electricity consumed in Florida is used to air condition our homes and businesses.

We wouldn’t have to worry about strategic coupling, dirty beaches, drowning polar bears, and excessive use of the First Amendment. Also, we might delay the ending of the world. Saving British PM Gordon Brown, Albion’s preeminent public Horse’s Ass, would be serendipitous.

The whole thing begins with you turning off your A/C.

Think globally; act locally.





Kevin Smith