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In a dream before dawn today, I told my friend Todd German, above, that he was acutely lonely, and he said I was right. On waking, I pondered what that could mean? Todd sits on the Key West Citizen Editorial Board, and I wondered yesterday how he felt about the editorial in yesterday’s Citizen (keysnews.com), yet another splendid little to do about much, my interjected clownings in bold italics:
EDITORIAL BOARD: PAUL A. CLARIN/PUBLISHER KAY HARRIS/ EDITOR ROBERT CINTRON JR. KEN DOMANSKI TODD GERMAN JENNIFER HULSE W. ANN REYNOLDS
Where do we go from here on housing issue [Issue? How about self-inflicted CRISIS?]
The voter referendum for the city’s purchase of Peary Court has been rejected by the voters. While there are numerous reasons for the demise of the Peary Court initiative, [including your vacillating back and forth between slamming the purchase and endorsing it] it is clear that the high cost of housing on our island paradise has and continues to create strife in our community. The issue that led to the referendum remains, with no resolution in sight. [Oh, there are resolutions in sight, but you don’t like them, because they don’t agree with your right-wing Republican religion.] Why not use the momentum built up over recent months to make steps forward to actually solve the affordable housing issue [self-inflicted CRISIS, why don’t YOU outline those steps in plain English?]. Although voters clearly did not believe that the city purchasing Peary Court is a viable option, [Option for what? To buy rental housing 90 percent of workers in the city could not afford? Housing of which there already is plenty in Key West?] the affordable housing discussion the referendum sparked was productive. Several organizations hosted workforce housing forums, inviting the public to engage with elected officials, civic leaders and developers, to offer insights and potential solutions to our affordable housing dilemma. [Such as, use the city’s remaining ROGOS (building rights) only on rental housing 90 percent of the city’s workers can afford; raise wages so people can afford rental housing in Key West; the rich people in Key West create a fund to have affordable rental housing built.] A political action committee, Housing First, was established to promote and support the city’s purchase of Peary Court. Housing First states its organization was formed to address the affordable housing crisis as a whole, not just for the Peary Court referendum. We challenge Housing First to live up to its promise to continue aggressively pushing for reasonable and feasible solutions to workforce housing. [Reasonable and feasible are Republican catch words for don’t ask the rich to do their part.] We also commend Commissioner Jimmy Weekley for promoting a “Plan B” in an effort to keep Peary Court as an affordable housing option for our residents. If the city can work with the current owners and any potential developers to encourage its use as workforce housing, we may be able to achieve the objective despite the outcome of the referendum. [Rest assured, any Plan B Jimmy Weekley and his PAC might work out with the carpetbaggers will make them, as would have the referendum if it had passed, feel like they had died and gone to heaven. What will cause them to feel just the opposite and save Peary Court and bring down its rents is the city locates its new homeless shelter right across the road on the city’s old transit terminal property.] Although there are many who believe that the private sector will eventually address the housing need and government shouldn’t get involved, that approach might be realistic in a different place, but it can’t work in the Keys. There are no nearby suburbs from which workers can commute. [Hello. Stock Island, Rockland Key, Big Coppit Key, the Saddlebunch Keys, the Sugarloaf Keys, Cudjoe Key, Summerland Key, Ramrod Keys, the Torch Keys, Big Pine Key are not suburbs from which people drive daily to work in Key West?] There aren’t large tracts of undeveloped land. [Hello, Truman Waterfront.] The state limits on ROGOs [building rights], the limits on building heights, FEMA regulations for flooding and many other factors all create a situation unlike anywhere else in the continental U.S. [Nice try, however, what created this situation was unbridled greed and development city and county elected officials, developers and their lawyers and planners, Realtors, Chambers of Commerce, people wanting second, third or fourth homes here, and local newspapers backed whole hog.] Therefore, normal market forces that typically allow housing supply to meet demand simply do not apply in the Keys. [Normal market forces (greed) applied nicely, and caused this mess.] The reality is landlords cannot be forced to price rents at below-market rates nor are employers able to pay workers ever-increasing wages. [Oh, the city could pass a minimum wage law, as could the county. Both governments could freeze rents.] However, there are ways to encourage and incentivize these important stakeholders to participate in creating solutions. We must solve our housing problem from within. Government has a very important role to play in supporting the development of affordable workforce housing. Our governmental entities should actively create an environment that encourages private development of lower-cost housing, including zoning, building code amendments supporting construction of small, single units requiring one-quarter ROGO allocations, [All ROGOs should be given to the Housing Authority, which is the only entity capable of building and operating without a loss actually affordable rental housing on free land the city and the county have.] and loosening building height restrictions in certain areas must be considered. [Only for Housing Authority projects, such as the senior living center on Kennedy Drive. The city and the county do not need even one more privately-developed home, condominium, apartment, hotel, motel, guest house, bed and breakfast.] And crackdowns on illegal vacation rentals — even changing the rules governing short-term rentals — would go a long way toward freeing up available rental units for residents. [Agreed, and good luck the city and county governments getting serious about that.] Any discussion about addressing the housing shortage must also include the federal government and the military. By encouraging those stationed here to live in off base housing, the Navy and Coast Guard are contributing to the lack of housing for the civilian workforce, including their own. Only the military has the available land and the resources of the federal government to help alleviate the crisis by building significantly more on-base housing. [The military contributes a great deal to the affordable housing crisis by giving military personal generous tax-free housing allowances for living off base, however the city and the county governments do have a good bit of land on which they can build actually affordable rental housing operated by the Housing Authority.] Considering that the military and Congress got us in the current situation with Peary Court by gifting the land along with the buildings to Balfour Beatty, and then allowing Balfour Beatty to keep the entire $35 million from the sale of the property and not holding them to promises of reinvesting that money in other local housing, the military cannot divorce themselves from its culpability in the local housing shortage. Regardless of where the Peary Court decisions were made, locally, the Pentagon or by Congress, it’s incumbent upon them to step up and take responsibility for this situation and provide active involvement in creating a solution. [Er, people in the city government knew the Navy and Balfour Beatty were putting Peary Court up for sale, and those people made executive decisions not to tell the City Commission, or the Citizen, or anybody who counted and might have generated a drive for the city to buy Peary Court for the same price the carpetbaggers ended up paying for it.] Right now, the community is focused on the dire need for additional affordable, workforce housing and the government — local and federal — should use all the tools at their disposal to actively address it. The time for talk is over.— The Citizen [Agreed, but until pigs fly, I bet talk is about all we are going to hear for quite a while. – The Sloan]
Todd German also is Chairman of Hometown PAC!, which sponsors calls to candidates, meet the candidates, and candidate forum events in Key West. So I also could take the dream this morning to say Todd is lonely for a new candidate in the Key West mayor’s race this year. That new candidate would be me, I suppose. However, right now, I’m up to my ass in alligators and crocodiles; I don’t have the money to run for public office, nor a secure place to live; and, to be “logical”, it seems like a really bad idea for me to run for mayor this year; and to be “realistic”, I doubt I would find 200 people in the city who would vote for me; so what would be the point in my going on yet another fool’s errand, just to stir the pot and watch it make no difference whatsoever, which is how the eight times I ran for public office in Key West and in the Florida Keys went? Of course, as Todd certainly knows, if the angels who ride me like a pack donkey, whipping my butt with a stick, dangling a carrot just out of reach of my snout, lean on me hard enough, I will file to run for mayor this year, because past times when I displeased the angels, they did inhuman and unhuman things to me, which left me in abject systemic terror of ever displeasing them again.
I ended up making much the same points in a Facebook thread a right wing lower Florida Keys Republican started yesterday, into which I plunged and actually kind of enjoyed it, because, I felt, the subject matter was far more in keeping with the awful training the angels put me through, than mucking myself in Key West and Florida Keys politics merry-go-rounds into hell. A couple or three Category 5 hurricanes, and/or a nasty mosquito-borne plague in Key West and the Florida Keys, would solve the affordable housing crises down here. It will take far more than that to fix America. Todd German belongs to the Republican Party. He saw combat with the U.S. Special Forces in Central America. If I were Todd and the Republican Party, I’d be far more afraid of Ted Cruz being the next U.S. president, than Donald Trump. Cruz is a right-wing religious fanatic. Any woman who votes for him hates herself and all women.
Well, here’s the right-wing Republican’s Facebook launch yesterday, which does not get into Ted Cruz:
8 hrs ·
In the last 18 months we have killed or arrested 95 people here in America that are linked to ISIS. ISIS did not exist prior to Obama’s presidency. It is the bastard child of Obama and Hillary. More than 250 persons on our shores have either joined or attempted to join ISIS. The threat is real..it is here, and Obama/Clinton refuse to acknowledge that it is even a threat.
Instead, Obama cavorts with a communist dictator. Hillary sweats out an FBI investigation.
http://threatknowledge.org/isis-threat-to-usa-report/.
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Sloan Bashinsky And George W. & Gang never went to war in Muslim lands and gave birth to al Qaeda and ISIS. Walt, my goodness. Is this like selective enforcement of Key West open container law only against homeless people?
Walt Lagraves Sloan you are flat wrong. ISIS was born after we pulled out of Iraq from the rag tag elements of AQI that we then failed to wipe out because we failed to leave a peace keeping force in place. AQI existed long before GWB and the 2nd Iraq war. Check it out with your angels.
Chris Rapp Sloan… you are beyond delusional. Bush gave birth to ISIS?!?! Go buy a history book.
Walt Lagraves Chris: You are very perspicasious. Sloan is a Keys local…a gadfly who has run for various public offices down here. He actually gets a dozen or so votes. He tells us that he is guided by the advice of his “angels”. That’s angels, not people. Sloan used to practice law…he tells us that he has, on occasion , been homeless, and that he is a passionate advocate for the homeless.
Sloan Bashinsky Er, you two are joking, right? The incredibly stupid, made up US war in Iraq had nothing to do with the birth of ISIS? America could have kept a peace keeping force in Iraq until hell froze over and not prevented the boomerang. Actually, I am no passionate advocate for the homeless, unless they are being targeted by police just because they are a homeless, a rather Gestapo behavior lots of Key West people applaud. Many homeless are so far gone that I think they would be better off dead, but not by Nazi methods; but by mercifully being taken in their sleep by angels. You can attack me all you want, but that does not erase that G.W. Bush, and his father, when he went into Kuwait solely because of its oil, also the reason for invading Iraq, launched World War III, which the fellow you blast, Barack Obama, the dumb shit, was supposed to try to cool off by pulling America out of Iraq, Afghanistan and the entire Middle East, including setting Israel adrift, right after he was sworn in. Instead, he proved himself to be a hawk, who had pretended to be a dove. You folks’ problem with someone like me is, I view the Democrats as fucked up as the Republicans. Both are religions, at war with each other like Islam and America are at war. Twiddley dee, twiddly dum, in the end, America will fall from within, although Islam might enjoy getting in some good licks along the way.
Walt Lagraves Sloan: I’m not attacking you..I have no reason to do so. My remarks are not editorial in nature, they simply are fact. I wish you well Sloan.
Sloan Bashinsky Okay, Walt, you did not write that as an attack, even though you had to figure it would be viewed as I am nuts and whatever. Perhaps you should tell Chris that, after reading a lot of what I was publishing on bigpinekey.com‘s Coconut Telegraph, which had a great deal in it about angels and about a whole lot of dramas I was engaging in the Florida Keys, and beyond, that you wanted to meet me, and you asked the owner of bigpinekey.com, did he think I’d like to sit down with you and him for dinner somewhere, and he passed along your invitation and I accepted pronto, and we met, you brought your nice wife, and we 4 had a great evening and meal together on Big Pine Key. Back then, I lived on the next key down, Little Torch, when I still had a pretty good bit of money. I tried over and over in my writings, which are far more voluminous than yours, Walt, and yours are voluminous, to encourage people to get over themselves, out of their tiny boxes in which they lived, and look at the bigger pictures, the forests, instead of weeds, twigs and branches, and not really all that many trees. I pretty much failed utterly in that endeavor, but the angels keep pushing me to keep at it, and since they have, in the past, scared the living shit out of me, when I strayed from their view of where I was supposed to head, I do my damndest to keep them happy. Were every person in the same boat as I, what a very different world this would be. But, instead, there is a great deal of flag waving, and my God says, and oh how that has fucked everything up.
Chris Rapp Sloan… first, use impartial, reputable sources to support your thesis. And, second, if you had said Bush awakened or stirred a sleeping ISIS, I would have agreed.
Sloan Bashinsky That’s exactly what the 2 Bush presidents did, and worse. Obama inherited that monster.
Sloan Bashinsky Tell you a story, Chris. during the night of 9/8/2001, sleeping in a tent on a friend’s land, a voice I had come to know well asked me in my sleep: “Will you make a prayer for a Divine Intervention for all of humanity?” I woke right up, wondering what that was about? I prayed for a Divine Intervention for all of humanity, short and sweet, in those very words. 3 days later, i understood why I had been asked to make the prayer, but not even today do I know if the prayer was answered, or if it was, what it looked, or looks, like. Shortly thereafter, the angles told me America should clear out of the Middle East altogether and divorce itself from Israel. I knew 9/11 was bait, a trap, regardless of who was behind it, hoping to draw America into a land war in Muslim lands. I had no inkling, though, America would be so incredibly stupid to launch wars in two different Muslim countries: Afghanistan and then Iraq. How those two wars went over there, and the awful impact they had in America, is the proof of how stupid and bad those two wars still are.
Chris Rapp No Sloan. GWB stirred the evil during their sleep. Obama allowed them to awake and take control. Iraq was stupid, even though the world is a better place without Sadam Hussein. Afghanistan was necessary, but poorly managed by GWB. Have you considered Lithium?
Walt Lagraves Chris: I tried it….it worked great on my bike chain.
Sloan Bashinsky Maybe you should try just opening your eyes. We have the Bush presidents to thank for the mess America is in with Islam, not Barack Obama, who was so Johnny come lately that it’s a joke to blame him for ISIS. I suppose al Qaeda is feeling left out and slighted here, and the Taliban, and the rest of Islam, who know who pissed and shit in their Holy Land - Bush and Bush, and American presidents before them, and after them.
Chris Rapp A voice in your sleep and you are telling me to open my eyes. You sound unhappy with a America. Maybe the Islam brother have a spare room for you. Try a sleep over first.
Sloan Bashinsky See, Walt, I told you what your nice comment, which was an attack, would lead to, but, sadly, it does not alter where you really ought to be heaping the blame for ISIS coming into being. The Bush guys and their oil friends and the US military-industrial complex. Same can be said of the Democrats and Lyndon Johnson re the Vietnam war, which really was about the rubber trees there.
Chris Rapp Walt… you must have used the extra greasy paste. Sloan… perhaps 800 mg next time.
Sloan Bashinsky I am unhappy with humanity, actually. It has cut itself off from God, by whatever name you wish to call “It”, don’t matter to me, there is only One. But I live in America, and now that I’m using the internet a lot, I see an incredible amount of near-sighted deaf people holding forth on pebbles on the ground they are kneeled down and pushing with their noses, thinking they are pushing great mountains. Islam is the same, by the way. And Judaism, too. And Christendom. What you might wish to ask yourself, Chris, is why do not Jesus, Archangel Michael and Melchizedek speak to you in your sleep, in plain English, from time to time, and in dreams every time you fall asleep, and in visions when you are awake? And in other ways you’d have to live in my skin to recognize as messages from Above the sewer in which humanity grovels.
Sloan Bashinsky Ah, Chris, 800 mg of truth put into each human being 3 times a day would do wonders for this species, and ward off it mutating (evolving) into zombies …
Sloan Bashinsky Meanwhile, I hope you two, and many other Republicans, and many Democrats, too, are enjoying the great theater, or circus, caused by the wannabes who want to live in the Offal Orifice for the next 4 years; what a splendid soap opera, albeit a bit vicious, Americans are putting on for their Islam brothers and sisters, and the rest of humanity, and quite a few extraterrestrial races and scads of angels to watch from afar, for now …
Sloan Bashinsky I’d love to hear you two’s thoughts on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQwndfHSeUk Will he blame Hillary and Obama for the war in Iraq? For the rise of ISIS, and before that, al Qaeda? He already said G.W. lied about Iraq.
Sloan Bashinsky No, I bet he’s gonna blame Bill Clinton for 9/11.
Bruce Percival There were stockpiles of chemical WMDs found in Iraq! One of my friends who was there to help pull Saddam Hussein out his little spider hole also found a warehouse full of the stuff! https://theintercept.com/…/twelve-years-later-u-s…/
Sloan Bashinsky Thank you, Bruce.
And here’s the rest of today’s comic relief, my contribution at the very bottom.
Erin Bean Mayer with Lucy Alvarido Mayer and 4 others.
· Key West, FL, United States ·
Dear Friends and Family, thank you for all of your support with our pet pig petition! Our new seasonal, neighbors gave up on having KW city code reversed to get rid of pet pigs. However, they are now saying our pig in particular and her litter box (she uses a litter box that we clean daily, just like a cat) should be removed altogether. Read: grasping at straws
There will be a code meeting, ON THE 30TH AT 1:30 AT THE OLD COURT HOUSE ON GREENE STREET. Please come to the meeting and show your support against this type of newbie, entitled attitude and to help our little Sophia. Thank you all again for everything you’ve done!?#?OneHumanFamily? ?#?KEYWEST? ?#?SaveSophia?
sloanbashinsky@outlook.com
