This is probably the only post I’m apt to make in support of a candidate, but this is my home turf sand.

The Pensacola Beach Blogger has a three post series on Drilling Rigs off the coast and what it will mean to the Panhandle. Floridians have gotten complacent because of the ban on drilling and were caught off guard when members of our House delegation, including Jeff Miller of District 1 and Allen Boyd of District 2 voted to re-open the issue. Hopefully our Senators, Nelson and Martinez, will be able to stop this bill in the Senate, and it won’t magically re-appear in a conference committee.

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There is a new report coming out that posits: Global Warming Fuels Wildfires.

The basic premise derived from three decades of data is that the snow pack is melting earlier and there are longer periods of hot, dry weather every year that are resulting in conditions more favorable to wildfires. There are not only more fires, but the fires are lasting longer and affecting larger areas. The fire season is starting earlier and lasting longer.

Locally, tropical storm Alberto was welcomed over in eastern Florida as it put out a number of persistence wildfires, and reduced the fire danger after an extremely dry Spring. Private fireworks were banned this year on the entire Panhandle because of the fire danger. All of the debris from the hurricanes of the last two years has dried out and is available to fuel a major fire in our pine forests.

We haven’t had enough low wind, high humidity days that are needed for the controlled burns that had reduced the fire threats in recent years.

I’ve mentioned before that the military was receiving dunning notices from their utility companies, but I was struck by this quote in the NBC article, Budget woes force Army bases to cut services:

But military analyst Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution said money management seems to be the larger problem. The Defense Department spends about as much on maintenance and operations as it does on weapons and personnel combined, he said, so there should be more than enough for the bills.

“It makes me worry if the Pentagon can’t do its accounting well enough to find money for its electric bills,” he said. “It just boggles my mind a little bit.”

This plays to the fact that the Shrubbery walked into a donut shop recently and had to borrow money from an aide for a snack – the wealthy don’t carry money, that’s why expensive purses are so small. They don’t worry about it, so they don’t actually track their spending. CEOs do the same thing, which is why they don’t notice when their corporations are heading down.

Money has never been a problem for these people, so they have no experience managing it. While some people are balancing health care, food, and rent, the wealthy just spend money when they have to. If you have never worried about running out, you are not apt to worry where it goes. The fact that other people may need money to stay in business, or to stay alive, just doesn’t occur to them.