On Mitt Romney's disrespect for military veterans

Former Navy secretary and Vietnam veteran
Jim Webb drops the hammer on Romney. via Politico.

Thanks to Alfred Spellman for the heads up.

Via The Washington Post:

Introducing President Obama in Virginia Beach, retiring Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), condemned Mitt Romney for failing to mention veterans or the military in his GOP convention speech.

The omission was all the more damning, Webb suggested, because Romney is of an age where he might have served in Vietnam but did not.

“If nothing else, at least mention some word of thanks and respect when a presidential candidate who is their generational peer makes a speech,” said Webb, a former Navy secretary and decorated Marine who served in Vietnam. Romney was exempted from the draft, first as a student and then as a missionary.

“This was a time when every American male was eligible to be drafted. People made choices,” Webb said. “Those among us who stepped forward to face the harsh unknowns did so with the belief that their service would be honored.”

Webb also tied in Romney’s much criticized remark that 47 percent of Americans believe they are “victims” who feel entitled to federal handouts, saying some of those benefits go to veterans.

“Those young Marines that I led have grown older now. All gave some. Some gave all. That’s not a culture of dependency,” he said. ”They paid. Some with their lives, some with their wounds, disabilities. Some with emotional scars. Some with lost opportunities. Not only did they pay, they are owed. They are owed.”

From December, 2011: Gay Vietnam vet looks Romney in the eye: ‘You can’t trust him’

Watch Michael Putney get splashed with water

Local 10's senior political reporter Michael Putney went looking for an interview at the home of Justin Lamar Sternad; the man whose whose failed congressional campaign is the subject of a federal grand-jury investigation.

Putney didn't get an interview but he did get a pitcher of water thrown in his face.

This afternoon he told me by phone that he's OK, but could use a dry shirt.

Click here to watch the video.

The way we were...Blonde firebug arrested

From the Miami News, Sept. 26, 1962.

Fifty years ago today, the editors at the Miami News decided a story about the arrest of "an attractive blonde with a police record as a firebug" would probably sell a lot more newspapers than a story about 75 people being executed by firing squads in Cuba.

Maybe now, they'll stay in jail for a while

Here's a shocker: the three men arrested in connection with the weekend robbery and shooting of an off-duty Miami-Dade police officer, have all been arrested before.

Dedrick Brown and Travares Santiago, 20, and Willie Barney, 19, have been arrested numerous times according to public records.

L. to R., Dedrick Brown, Willie Barney and Travares Santiago.

One of the men, Dedrick Brown was out on felony bond after being arrested just last month on a charge of carrying a concealed firearm.

Click to enlarge.

Willie Barney, the man who police say shot the officer, was convicted in 2009 on an armed robbery charge.

And, despite being just 20 years-old, Travares Santiago has racked up a string of arrests that include auto theft, sale and possession of cocaine and marijuana and aggravated battery on a pregnant female.

But, it took their latest brush with the law to finally keep them in jail...at least for the foreseeable future. Today, all were ordered held in jail without bond.

Today, I asked Miami Beach attorney Michael Grieco how it was possible that these three could be walking the streets despite their criminal pasts. Here's his response:

Our criminal system, not just in Miami-Dade, but everywhere, is based upon an innocent-until-proven-guilty model.

Unless one is charged with a non-bondable offense (facing life in prison generally) or was either out of custody on a previous case or in violation of probation, he or she is entitled to a bond/pretrial release as a matter of right.

Carrying a Concealed Firearm is a third degree felony and usually carries no more than a $5000 bond (10% to a bondsman gets him out).

I am sensitive to a law-abiding citizens concern for safety, but an arrest does not necessarily mean guilt, and a Defendant is entitled to his day in court without sitting jail while he waits. In the case of the subjects in this case, they are young and have had very little contact with the system previously. They will be held without bond now because of the nature of the charge.

By the way.... here's a prediction: You probably won't be reading about the criminal pasts or seeing the pictures of these thugs in the pages of the Miami Herald anytime soon.

Homegrown in Florida

Several weeks ago, my friend Jeff Klinkenberg, who writes for the Tampa Bay Times, posted a link to a new book on his Facebook page.

The book - Homegrown in Florida - is a collection of stories by writers who were either born in Florida or who grew up in the state.

Two of Jeff's stories are included in Homegrown.

Jeff's colleague at the Times, environmental writer Craig Pittman, also has a story in the book.

A few days ago, I asked Jeff and Craig if they'd send me a few paragraphs from their stories.

Here are those excerpts along with their remembrances of a much simpler time in Florida.

Jeff: I am a child of the Miami 50s and 60s -- the days when kids went barefoot, climbed coconut palms, played in the woods, built rafts and for some of us, fished from morning until night. It was an innocent time and sometimes I think my life was something out of Mark Twain. Sometimes I wonder how I survived some of things I did, how any of us survived it. Of course, the fact is, not all of us did.

Jeff Klinkenberg in Miami in the 1960s.

This excerpt is from an essay called "Nothing I could do'' from 1987. It's still very hard for me to read it.

I liked to climb to the roof at night and throw water balloons at passing cars, and when that lost its novelty I hurled guavas, a common tropical fruit. One night, a couple of teen-agers whose car I smashed with a guava chased a friend and me over fences, through bushes and into back yards where dogs snapped at our heels. We somehow escaped.

One night, a friend and I built a dummy, and, hiding behind a bush, threw it in front of a passing car. The car screeched to a stop, and an elderly man got out, shaking, certain he had killed somebody. I am still ashamed.

By the time I was 14 I was a fishing fanatic. I fished for snook in a canal that passed through a golf course in Miami Shores. I had to trespass to fish, but I was good at climbing high fences, and I didn't mind running from the cops. The cops would take you to the police station, call your parents, and confiscate your tackle. They never caught me.

Sometimes I wish I had been caught. If I had, maybe I would have stayed away from the golf course once and for all. Maybe Keith still would be alive, and on those nights when I lie awake in a cold sweat I would no longer hear him screaming for his mother.

I went back last week. In Miami for business, I had a couple of hours to kill and drove to the golf course . I walked along the first fairway, crossed a bridge that spanned the canal, passed under the railroad trestle - and then stopped when I saw the dam.

I was staring at the dam when a golf course ranger drove up in an electric cart. ''What are you doing?'' he asked. I told him I'd come back to the scene of a tragedy that has haunted me for 23 years, a tragedy my mind continually dredges up whenever I am depressed or I start worrying about the safety of my own sweet children. Death is no abstraction to me. That a lot of people live to old age is, I know, a matter of luck, of being in the right place at the right time. I am afraid to trust happiness.

''I remember it,'' the golf course ranger said. ''I lived across the street from the 16th fairway. I remember all the excitement. It was awful.''

''I was there,'' I said.

''Kids still sneak on the golf course to fish,'' he said. ''I chased 10 away already this afternoon.''

''Take it from me,'' I said. ''It's no place to fish.''

Jeff's website: JeffKlinkeberg.com

_________________

Craig: This is a picture taken in my pine-tree-packed backyard in Pensacola, circa 1972. Behind me is the green concrete block house I grew up in. It had jalousie windows, the kind you can crank out or crank in. Usually there was at least one where the crank broke or the window didn't close all the way. You can see just a sliver of the mobile home park next door. I'm standing next to a box kite that my friend David and I were using for what we believed to be "scientific" experiments on the principles of flight that allowed all those Navy jets to zoom overhead all the time. Taped to the kite is the name of the research "company" we invented, Pittman & Fields Inc. It was headquartered in a ramshackle tree house we built in that same backyard.

Craig Pittman in 1972.

When I was a kid I was obsessed with airplanes. If I saw a plane flying near our yard, I’d run to get underneath it. I thought having a plane fly over you brought you good luck. Even if I could just catch the tip of a wing, it was enough.

Because we lived in Pensacola, “the Cradle of Naval Aviation,” Navy training flights were zooming over all the time. We lived in a one-story concrete-block house, painted green as if it were trying to blend in with the pine needles hanging from the trees around it. Our house looked like it belonged in the suburbs, but we lived on a red clay road as we were way out in the country.

I hated that clay. It meant I could never ride my bike beyond our driveway. When the weather was dry, my tires would sink into the loose clay like I was trying to ride through a sand dune. When rain fell, the road turned into such a morass that was impossible to wade through it, much less ride around in it. Once in a while the county would send a big yellow grader around to smooth it out, but that never lasted long. I was an only child on a street with no playmates, trapped there by a lack of asphalt.

The downside to living in a Navy town is that the population is fairly transient. Next door to our house was a trailer park where the residents, most of them Navy folks, moved in and out so fast we never got to know them. Probably it didn’t help that every time one of them looked out one of those tiny windows, they saw me running around in circles, head tilted toward the sky like I was watching for UFOs. Clearly I was nuts.

Craig's website: CraigPittman.com

The way we were...'Lady in Cement' - 1968

Before 'Scarface" and "Miami Vice," made-in-Miami crime dramas looked a lot like 1968's "Lady in Cement."





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