Politics comes to the nudist colony

The assignment: Cover a political debate at a nudist camp. The challenge: To keep my juvenile sense of humor in check.





FORUM AT NATURIST RESORT GOES OFF WITHOUT HITCH
Date: Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

It is great to watch the body politic put democracy in action, but maybe not so much when the body isn't wearing clothes.

That was plain to see at last week's candidate forum at the Sunsport Gardens Family Naturist Resort in Loxahatchee Groves.

The hopefuls for the Groves' first Town Council were fully dressed, mind you.

But moderator and the nudist camp's owner Morley Schloss wore only a pale beaded necklace.

And about a dozen men and women in the audience of about 100 also were clad only in the skin God gave them, plus some more picked up at the dessert table. A dozen other folk were in sarong or towel -- feeling overdressed, I imagined.

It was an unlikely meeting of potbellies and pothole politics. Private parts and public policy. News people and nude people.

Although photographers, including some from national publications, snapped away, business was conducted as if it were nothing to take questions from people dressed in nothing.

If anyone felt weird that a naked woman was signaling "time's up" when candidates rambled too long about traffic noise, police response times or unused sewer capacity, no one showed it.

"Not here in the Groves," said Bill Louda, a candidate for Seat 2.

Separate, unequal

The first idea behind this story was to profile life on Route 80, the east-west highway that connects Palm Beach County's very weathiest community to its poorest, with various degrees of urban and rural middle-class in between. The subject proved too unwieldy, so I dropped the road and kept the two extremes.






A TALE OF TWO STARKLY DIFFERENT COMMUNITIES -- ONE OPULENT AND THE OTHER, NOT FAR DOWN THE ROAD, TRAPPED IN POVERTY
Date: Sunday, March 4, 2007
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

They're united by one road. Two towns connected by 40 miles of highway -- and separated by just about everything else.

The road, known as Southern Boulevard, State Road 80 and other names, bisects Palm Beach County from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Okeechobee; it crosses a Middle America of strip malls, box stores and burgeoning suburbia.

But at the two ends, you find the extraordinary -- two communities whose differences in wealth and status couldn't be starker.

At the ocean end, an international emblem of affluence, a place where the Gilded Age never ended. Palm Beach, described in a best-selling tell-all called The Season as "a sliver of land known throughout the world as the most wealthy, glamorous, opulent, decadent, extravagant, self-indulgent, sinful spot on Earth."

At the western reach, a poverty-haunted town immortalized by Edward R. Murrow's 1963 CBS News indictment of migrant living conditions, Harvest of Shame. Belle Glade, described in Vanity Fair in 2003 as "the saddest place in America."

The Rev. John Mericantante makes this drive at least once week. He's the resident priest at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Pahokee, a few miles northeast of Belle Glade and at least equally poor. His family, originally from Boston, owns an apartment in Palm Beach, and he visits every Monday to check on things.

In an hour and half, he goes from "a swimming pool and basking in the sun" to his church near Lake O. and his mostly Mexican congregants -- people "looking for a room to live in, food to eat."

"You start at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago and you end up here," he says.

"It's like going from Technicolor," he says, "to old black and white."

Backwards thinking on taxes

Things go slow

Henry Flagler would have put this plan on the fast track

By Howard Goodman | Commentary

We need Henry Flagler back.
In his day, when an industrial magnate could be king of all he surveyed, things got done in the state of Florida.
Once the right-hand man of John D. Rockefeller, Flagler moved here in the 1880s and basically built the town of St. Augustine.
Bringing civilization to the hinterlands of Florida gave Flagler a second career and a new self-image. No longer a grasping oil baron, he was now a far-seeing railroad man, conqueror of wilderness, futurist.
Heading where it was even warmer. So, he extended his railroad 200 miles south, where he envisioned virgin land becoming the luxury resort of Palm Beach and a commercial adjunct, West Palm Beach.
When his tracks reached the shores of Lake Worth, he built big hotels for the Social Register's "400" and the Palm Beach mansion for himself that's now the Flagler Museum.
When a frost hit West Palm, Flagler was persuaded to take his rail line even farther south -- to the sweltering little frontier outpost of Miami.
When he got to Biscayne Bay, he built an electric plant, water works, sewage system, churches and a golf course.
The grateful citizenry wanted to rename the town in his honor.
But he begged off, and that's why the Miami Dolphins are not the Flagler Dolphins.
Extraordinary stuff.
And what's truly astounding is how quickly Flagler did it all.
It took, for example, just two years to build that rail line from Fort Pierce to Miami.
Flagler's train line reached Fort Pierce on Jan. 29, 1894. Even with a three-month hiatus, it hit Miami by April 1896.
Now Flagler's old line, the Florida East Coast Railway, is being seriously considered for passenger travel in metro South Florida, population 5 million and counting.
This is a wonderful idea. You could board in downtown West Palm and hop off in the middle of Delray Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Miami or any number of increasingly urbanized spots along Dixie Highway.
It would be a great alternative to traffic jams and a better bet than Tri-Rail, where most stops don't leave you within walking distance of anywhere.
But even the most optimistic rail buffs don't see passenger trains rolling on those FEC lines until, ahem, 2015.
That's eight years from now. Four times as long as it took Henry Flagler to build the thing in the first place.
It will take that long because the FEC's owners say they might share their tracks with passenger trains,
but only if their freight cars get priority. That means adding two or three more tracks, an expensive proposition. To get the federal money we'd need, South Florida as a region would have to apply for competitive grants, first proving we can pay our half of capital costs. Which means a new local tax.
We're talking environmental studies, local land-use decisions, and on and on.
Flagler didn't have to deal with red tape. Of course, in the 1890s he didn't have to treat workers humanely or worry about the manatee.
The state was happy to see the rich guy take control of a project and go at it.
"To build infrastructure in the state, there was no tax base. So he was a hero. They couldn't do enough for him," says Les Standiford, author of Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad That Crossed an Ocean.
Just look at the way we've complicated our world.
The Empire State Building? It took a little more than year to build it in 1930-31, the depth of the Depression.
The Pentagon? It took 16 months during World War II.
Florida's Turnpike? Just two years to build the 110 miles from Fort Pierce to Miami.
Now, it can take two years to redo an interchange.
In an age when everything from communications to courtship is faster than in our grandparents' day, it seems that getting big things done takes longer and longer.
What's missing, maybe, is the will.
I'll bet if Flagler were still around, he'd find a way to get this baby finished.
"I guarantee, if he thought there was a dollar in putting passengers on that line, I doubt very much it would ake him until 2015 to get it done," Standiford says.

Keystone Kops? Not.

It's not easy to admit error. So I thought it was important to salute the police said they had the wrong men.

Boynton police acted properly in the deadly mall shooting case

By Howard Goodman | Commentary

A lot of people probably think the Keystone Kops are alive and well in Boynton Beach.
The town's police do seem prone to pratfalls:
Two men are arrested in the shooting death of a suspected gang member at the Boynton Beach Mall crowded with last-minute shoppers on Christmas Eve. It's one of the most public murders in recent memory.
After a couple of days they release one of the men, a purported accomplice, saying he had no hand in the killing of Berno Charlemond, 24, though he was involved in a fight with him moments before the fatal shots were fired.
And on Wednesday, they release the second man, the supposed shooter, saying they no longer believe he pulled the trigger.
Investigators were spending the rest of the week looking for a third man. The new prime suspect.
Yes, it would be easy to poke fun at the cops.
But I'm not going to do it.
Instead, I give them credit. They've gone to the trouble of making sure they've got the right guys -- even at the risk of embarrassment by owning up to a flub.
As a reporter in Philadelphia in the 1990s, I saw more than one case in which men were serving long prison terms on convictions that looked plenty dubious, if not flat-out wrong, with the benefit of 10 or 20 years' hindsight.
When you pieced the facts together, you'd see that detectives apparently had latched onto a suspect early in their investigation, and then cherry-picked evidence and coerced witnesses to prove their early pick was right.
That's not happening here. And while it's frustrating to watch suspected gang members sprung back to the streets, it's good to see that the Boynton police are more interested in seeking out and charging the guilty, rather than just clearing the case.
The Boynton police aren't giving out many details about their change of mind. But I'm guessing it wasn't made lightly.
After all, a probable-cause affidavit written the day after the shooting, presents a pretty persuasive scenario for arresting 21-year-old Jesse Cesar on a charge of first-degree murder.
It mentions an unnamed "off-duty firefighter who pointed out the defendant as being an active shooter" and who "has given a sworn taped statement and chosen Cesar out of a six-person photo lineup."
"Several other officers," the affidavit states, "have given sworn taped statements that Cesar was seen firing a firearm in there [sic] immediate direction with knowledge that police were on the scene."
Sounds pretty tight.
But if we've learned anything from countless re-runs of Law & Order, or from the Japanese film masterpiece Rashomon, it's that different witnesses or participants will recount vastly different versions of the same event. What we think of as shared reality can be a splintered thing.
According to Boynton police spokeswoman Suzanne Gitto, the ongoing investigation brought up new facts. She wouldn't say what those were. But they must have soundly contradicted the initial reports.
Once the lead investigator, Chris Crawford, realized that the facts no longer supported the grounds for Cesar's arrest, he had an ethical and legal obligation to reveal that to the court.
Michael Edmondson, spokesman for State Attorney Barry Krischer, said this kind of reconsideration goes on all the time in law enforcement. But it's usually behind the scenes. The highly public nature of the mall shooting made the process visible this time, he said.
"We surely are not surprised by the outcome," he said. "Quite often we see this in the development of a case."
It does seem awry that a suspect in a high-profile shooting is either held for murder or let go, with no apparent middle ground. That's why it's good to see that, at Sheriff Ric Bradshaw's invitation, the feds are joining the local fight against gang activity. With anti-racketeering statutes, more secrecy in investigations and better guarantees for protecting witnesses under the federal system, there's a far better chance of nailing bad guys around general circumstances involving murder, drugs and use of guns.
The Boynton police might look like they're fumbling. But they're trying to get the right result. That's more important than worrying about how smooth they look.

Uneasy over electronic voting

Electronic voting was easy enough ... so why do I feel uneasy?

By Howard Goodman | Commentary

I voted Monday.
It took five minutes.
I walked into the South County Elections Office, and a couple of kindly poll workers took my name and address, checked my driver's license and handed me a plastic card.
I inserted the card into the machine, and a virtual ballot appeared on screen.
I made my choices, looked them over, then pushed the final button.
Poof.
My votes were gone.
Recorded, I hoped.
Gee, I thought: That was easy.
But I felt uneasy.
There was no piece of paper to look over one last time before releasing it from my fingers into a ballot box.
There was nothing but blank screen.
Like every other voter in the new e-voting age, I have to trust that the tabulations will accurately reflect my choices.
And that no accidental bug or intentional saboteur erases my votes.
Or sticks them in the other guys' columns.
Yet sorry to say, the systems we're using don't merit our trust.
Sure, spokesmen for this big-bucks industry tell us there's nothing to worry about. But experience is showing otherwise.
In Maryland last month, machines froze, access cards choked, computerized voter lists crashed -- a combination of technical and human error.
Gov. Robert Erlich, a Republican, was so fed up, he now wants to scrap his state's $106 million system and return to paper ballots.
Maryland's equipment is from Diebold Election Systems, whose machines have been hacked in experiments at Princeton University and in the office of Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho.
Palm Beach County uses a system by Sequoia Voting Systems, which is currently under fire for alleged ties to Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez. The convoluted history here involves the California-based company's sale last year to a much smaller company called Smartmatic Corp. with headquarters in a tree-lined office park in Boca Raton. Smartmatic was founded by a young Spanish-Venezuelan engineer named Antonio Mugica and two colleagues. After getting what officials called a small business loan of $200,000 from a Venezuelan government financing agency, the young company supplied machines in Venezuela for a 2004 referendum on Chavez -- making so much money, they were able to buy 100-year-old Sequoia for $120 million in 2005.
At a conference-call press conference in Washington on Monday, Mugica saw nothing fishy in his firm's meteoric growth. "We have the best technology," he said.
Mugica and company spokesman denied the firm is owned or controlled by the leftist Chavez. They said they develop and sell voting machines; they don't run elections.
To prove they're on the up and up, they said, they had invited the federal investigation, by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, that made headlines over the weekend.
Smartmatic's business practices might prove to be as completely ordinary as its officials say.
It's in the nature of private companies to do things like contribute heavily to the Republican Party (Diebold) or set up international business arrangements with countries our government doesn't like (Smartmatic).
But when the private companies that do these ordinary things play a dominant role in our elections procedures without sufficient oversight, we are clearly playing with fire.
Fact is, as long as there have been elections in America, there has been mischief. The expression "stuff the ballot box" doesn't come from nowhere.
And yet, Florida has adopted inane rules that don't allow hand recounts when electronic voting is involved.
That don't allow us to look inside the machinery to check that everything is kosher.
That wise man, Ronald Reagan, said in regard to treaties with the Soviet Union, we must be able to "trust,but verify."
Right now, we can't verify that the votes which define our democracy are being counted correctly.
So how can we trust?

The Donald and the flag

Some controversies can only happen in the town of Palm Beach ...





LIGHTEN UP, SIP A MACCHIATO, AND LET THE DONALD FLY HIS GIANT FLAG
Date: Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

If you are Donald Trump, by gum, you should be able to do whatever the heck you want.

This is because you are the richest man on earth and you have the most luscious string of wives and ex's, the most successful casinos and the top-rated show on television.

Well, maybe you're not exactly the very richest person. And maybe someone else has a more profitable casino and a more popular show ... but let's not nitpick. These are the kind of piddling details that obsess the sort of losers who hear the words: "You're fired!"

If you are The Donald, you are not impeded by the little facts that hamper smaller men. You do not let yourself be bound by little laws.

The Town of Palm Beach does not understand the grandiosity of The Donald.

Congressman and a 'cute butt'

Congressman forfeited privacy when he crossed the line of decency

By Howard Goodman | Commentary

Three years ago, when confronted with "revolting and unforgiving" reports that he is gay, Mark Foley angrily held a news conference to say he deserved to keep his private life private.
"Elected officials, even those who run for the United States Senate, must have some level of privacy," the Republican congressman declared.
And most in the media complied.
Just as leaders in the House of Representatives apparently dealt with "overly friendly e-mails" with, at most, a word of warning.
Hey, no sense disturbing the man's privacy.
Now, of course, Foley's life has come unwrapped in about as spectacular a fashion as anyone can imagine.
Not for a secret life as a gay man, which never seemed to bother anybody in his district who knew about it. But for dozens of creepy e-mails and Internet text messages that show him lusting, in the most literal terms, after teenage boys.
In the space of a few days, he's gone from Mark Foley, R-Fort Pierce, shoo-in for a seventh term in Congress, to Mark Foley, ruined man.
The R after his name now stands for Recovery, that ever-expandable society for America's fallen celebrities.
He's gone into hiding -- er, retreat -- er, rehab -- and sent out a surrogate to confess all manner of ugly and awful secrets.
Can the bookings on Oprah and Dr. Phil be far behind?
How soon until we see the repentant autobiography and the bid for public forgiveness?
His attorney-spokesman David Roth tells us Foley takes full responsibility for his actions. But then enumerates all kinds of factors that Foley just has to get off his chest in the name of his recovery. Not that we should mistake any of these for extenuating circumstances, mind you.
Foley's claiming that he's an alcoholic. But since when does getting drunk make you lust over a young boy's rear end?
Or as Maf54, Foley's nom de keyboard, calls it: "cute butt bouncing in the air."
Foley wants us to know that he was molested as a teen by an anonymous clergyman. But since when does everyone who's molested in turn get to take an unhealthy interest in children?
"It's very rare, actually," said Barbara Blaine, president of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), from Chicago.
"The overwhelming majority of abuse victims hurt themselves, not others," added David Clohessy, SNAP national director, from St. Louis, "through self-destructive behavior, criminal behavior, isolation, addictions and so on."
Foley also wants us to know he is gay. But what a disservice that does to the great majority of gay people.
He's given new ammunition for those people who think that sexual predation and homosexuality are synonymous.
Roth promises us that, categorically, Foley never engaged in pedophile activity and never had a teenager in his apartment for sex.
Maybe that's true if you define pedophilia strictly as sex with someone under age 13. But this week's crop of Internet messages, reported by ABC News, make that assertion hard to believe.
One -- from 2003 while Foley took a break from a vote on authorizing money for the Iraq war -- indicate that instant message exchanges reached a sexual climax.
"Ok, i better go vote," writes Foley near the end of that exchange. "Did you know you would have that effect on me."
All these secrets. We're hearing about them after the harm is done.
If it's true that Foley was a closet alcoholic and a childhood victim of clergy sex abuse, wouldn't it have been better to be honest about it? Honest to himself? To us?
Keeping it buried sure didn't make things better.
All the while Foley was keeping his cherished zone of privacy, he was walking a tightrope, living the high profile life of a congressman while behaving in ways that could destroy him.
"The one response to child and sexual abuse that always fails is silence," says Clohessy, himself a childhood victim of a priest's sexual advances.
To quote the singer-philosopher Paul Simon, silence like a cancer grows.
"And cancer, if there's even to be a prayer of recovery, has to be exposed and rooted out. It's painful and risky, but doing nothing is far more painful and more risky," Clohessy said.
On Wednesday, former Foley aide Kirk Fordham, himself resigning in the Foley fallout, said he warned Speaker Dennis Hastert's office more than three years ago about Foley's troublesome behavior. Three years ago!
The Republican leadership that kept quiet reminds me of the Catholic hierarchy that has protected priests for years and years, preferring to keep things under wraps to protect the membership over forthrightly removing and punishing the wrongdoers to protect children.
I don't have any confidence that Democrats would do things differently if they were in charge.
It's all about keeping the lid on long enough to make our side look good and their side look bad.
This isn't just about a man preying on teenagers. This is a man using his position in Congress to view the page program as his own little buffet table.
This is about a man who advances his career by parading as a valiant protector of young people, while mocking the notions of decency he claims to defend.
As recently as July, Foley was scoring political points by backing tougher laws against sex offenders. "For too long our nation has tracked library books better than it has sex offenders," he said as the Senate moved a bill to close enforcement loopholes.
Now I can't help wondering: What was Maf54 writing that day?

Naked confessions

Naked confessions of Foley's priest are hard to swallow

By Howard Goodman | Commentary

Now, that's a relief: It was only saunas and massages in the nude, skinny-dipping and fondling.
Thank God it was nothing like sex.
The interview confessions of the Rev. Anthony Mercieca induce a kind of stunned amazement that any man of the cloth would so easily admit to behavior that's so patently wrong, while blithely acting as though everything was quite all right.
Mercieca is the Roman Catholic priest who says he cavorted with a young altar boy named Mark Foley when he was assigned to Sacred Heart Church in Lake Worth in 1967.
Foley grew up to be the six-time Republican congressman with the secret life that included a nasty habit of engaging teenage boys in Internet-message sex talk.
As the whole world knows, the 52-year-old from Fort Pierce abruptly resigned last month when some of his cringe-producing exchanges with congressional pages became public.
After disappearing into his undisclosed recovery bunker, Foley had a lawyer announce that the disgraced pol was (a) a secret alcoholic and (b) molested by a clergyman.
Thus hitting the Daily Double of excuse-making, Foley then wanted us to know that none of this was an excuse.
The stage was set for enterprising reporters to find Mercieca, who at 69 is retired and living on the small Maltese island of Gozo, a geography trivia answer in the Mediterranean Sea.
Mercieca has proved a most obliging subject.
"We were friends and trusted each other as brothers and loved each other as brothers," Mercieca told The Associated Press.
He said he and Foley would go into saunas naked, but "everybody does that."
Oh, sure. Lots of parents want to see their son or daughter dipping naked in the spa with their minister or rabbi.
In all his interviews, he denied having sexual intercourse with Foley, then all of 13.
"It's not something you call, I mean, rape or penetration or anything like that, you know," he told WPTV Ch.5. "It was just fondling."
Anybody else out there having trouble holding down their breakfast?
As mea culpas go, Mercieca's sounds as persuasive as Bill Clinton's protestations about the oral ministrations of Monica Lewinsky not counting as sex.
But according to David Clohessy, national director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, there's a big difference. Clinton undoubtedly lied to save his job. But "the priest's crimes are so egregious and so taboo, I think he's lying to protect his twisted psyche."
Clohessy, of St. Louis, is himself a childhood victim of a priest's abuse.
"If I had to guess," he said, "the priest's heart is filled with turmoil and guilt and confusion and shame. And the brain would be clear and neat and orderly and make these distinctions. And that's how he can talk so dispassionately about this."
Richard Sipes, a former monk and priest who wrote a classic work on the sexual and celibate practices of Catholic clergy, A Secret World, said Mercieca is very typical.
"Dioceses throughout the United States are now recording an average of 7 percent priest abusers of minors in their records," Sipes writes in a soon-to-be-published report.
The tawdry doings are rationalized as "tickling," "a massage," "friendship."
The result is a fascinating, perverse psychological hall of mirrors.
In Merceica, you have a priest who plays naked with boys and touches them in the wrong places, but sees nothing wrong in it.
In Foley, you have one of those boys growing up to be a denouncer of this very behavior -- going so far as to raise public alarms over a youth nudist camp that has run for years without complaint. Is he trying to protect a younger, wounded version of himself against another, predatory version of himself?
Because all the while Foley is blasting the exploitation of minors, he is secretly engaging in it.
It's only when he is caught that he suddenly comes forward to reveal being abused by the priest.
It's dizzying.
And sickening.

Politicans and priests acting badly

For a time in 2006, Palm Beach County was a bonanza for crazy behavior from public figures. In one particularly rich stretch, we had priests robbing the till and a congressman making weird sexual advances to teen boys. Hence...





TRIO'S BETRAYAL KNOCKS PUBLIC'S PRECIOUS TRUST DOWN ANOTHER NOTCH
Date: Sunday, October 1, 2006
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

Hey, isn't it supposed to be the politicians who get caught stealing money?

And the priests who get accused of misbehavior with boys?

Well, that's not how it goes in Palm Beach County.

In a dizzying couple of days last week, we were hit with back-to-back shockers:

Two priests from St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church in Delray Beach stood accused of stealing millions of dollars from collection plates over four decades -- money that parishioners had taken out of their pockets and intended for widows and orphans and good works -- and spending it on condos, gambling trips, girlfriends and other pleasures not usually associated with the priestly life.

And while that was just sinking in, six-term U.S. Rep. Mark Foley abruptly announced his resignation, one day after the emergence of some creepy-sounding e-mails he had sent last year to a 16-year-old congressional page.

Until that moment, the Republican from Fort Pierce looked like a shoo-in for re-election.

And for 24 hours, his camp tried damage-control, accusing Democratic challenger Tim Mahoney of releasing the e-mails (which Mahoney denied) and saying there was nothing inappropriate about them. Which, in any other context but politics, would seem like contradictory statements.

But the teenager sure thought something was strange about receiving messages from a man in his 50s who wanted to know, "... what do you want for your birthday coming up ..." and "send me a pic of you as well ..."

The kid, unnamed in news reports, was so jarred that he wrote to an associate on Capitol Hill: "Maybe it is just me being paranoid, but seriously. This freaked me out."