The Boy Scouts of America vote tomorrow on a proposal that would end the organization's long-running ban on openly gay scouts. Predictably, traditional values types favor keeping the ban. Just as predictably, Florida Christian conservatives are in the forefront of the reaction, rallying to stem the tide of time.

The BSA meeting on the outskirts of Dallas consists of the 1400 members of the group's national council, who will consider new membership standards devised in February by the BSA executive committee. The new standards include this statement:

No youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone.

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Republicans and Tea Party types say they respect the men and women of the military.
If respect means wrapping yourself in the flag and sending young people off to die, so it is. Back home again, it's another story. Conservatives cracking down on social welfare spending hits veterans especially hard, since homelessness, unemployment, medical care and mental health needs are major issues of theirs.

Fed up with the phony stance of the political right, local liberals are meeting tomorrow night to organize a Palm Beach County chapter of the Florida Democratic Veterans Caucus. Though you don't have to be a veteran to attend and join (you do have to be a Democrat) they're hoping for a significant turnout. There are an estimated 115,000 military veterans living in Palm Beach County, 1200 of them vets of Iraq and Afghanistan.

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It started out in Florida in 2010, born out of revulsion at the prospect of oil rigs in the near offshore. That February, more than 10,000 concerned citizens just said "no," linking hands on dozens of beaches across the state, drawing a literal line in the sand. Mere months later, in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the protest went global, with more than 1,000 events in all 50 states and 42 countries on every continent except Antarctica.

Tomorrow they're doing it again, with a focus on offshore drilling's broader context: dependence on fossil fuels and its major result, climate change. It's not just about pristine beaches anymore.

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A hard-nosed journalist and a hard-boiled author are teaming up Tuesday to talk about newspapering and crime fiction; to eat, drink and be merry; and to raise a few bucks for innovative local investigative news organ the Broward Bulldog.

The evening's featured guest is Michael Connelly, a Broward boy whose years as a reporter here and in L.A. lead to a reincarnation as a best-selling, prize-winning crime fiction writer. The host is veteran South Florida reporter Dan Christensen, who made his bones breaking stories for the Miami Herald and the Daily Business Review, winning a few awards of his own. In 2009 he plunged into the whirlpool of digital journalism, founding the Broward Bulldog.

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"Can't anybody here play this game?" -- Baseball manager Casey Stengel, about the 1962 New York Mets, whose 120 losses are the most by any MLB team in one season in the 20th century.

See also:
- Chick-fil-A Stadium: FAU Considered Homophobic Firm

Hapless Florida Atlantic University president Mary Jane Saunders resigned yesterday, and with their usual talent for due diligence and public relations savvy, the board of trustees filled the still-stinking seat with Dennis Crudele, who reportedly was go-between in the school's effort to sell naming rights to its football stadium to the notoriously homophobic fast-food chain Chick-fil-A.

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That GOP need to build bridges to the nation's Hispanic community? The need party elders have talked so much about since Barack Obama was re-elected largely due to Hispanic support? The need that's propelled Florida's own Marco Rubio to preeminence in the early scouting reports on the GOP 2016 presdential nomination? Not going too well.

A goddamned disaster, in fact, according to Pablo Pantoja, who last spring led the GOP's outreach to Hispanic voters in crucial swing state Florida. In a letter made public Monday, Pantoja announced he'd had it up to here with the GOP's "culture of intolerance" and had switched his party registration from GOP red to Democratic blue. As an added twist of the knife, he said he was "making a modest contribution" to a GOP bête noire, the ACLU, for its work in support of the "rights of immigrants and civil liberties in general" -- and included a link to the group's pledge page.

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Working class. What a concept. A shameful secret, even, in a world where we're all supposed to be either "upwardly mobile" or eternally grateful for the crumbs from the tables of the "job creators." Bullshit. Stuff don't happen -- and bosses don't get rich -- unless ordinary people put their shoulders to the wheel. Let Apple's board of directors build the computers themselves.

Blowing the cover on that, and in support of working class pride, a free mini-festival of films about work, working people and the fight for a fair shake happens tomorrow and Wednesday in Delray Beach and Fort Lauderdale. Co-sponsored by the advocacy group Florida Public Employees Partnership (FPEP) and Florida International University's Center For Labor Studies, the two programs of short films and features are an offshoot of the week-long "Workers Unite Film Festival" in New York.

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Ever see that photo of the python that tried to swallow an alligator-- and the gator explodes out the python's side as it's being digested? Or watch animal combat videos on YouTube, with great predators of the planet going at it tooth and claw? That's how we feel reading about local lords of the capitalist jungle as they tear at each other in courtroom battle. But where the animals are awesome, the humans are, for all their wealth and power, merely sordid.

Case in point is that of Palm Beach construction magnate Dan Catalfumo and Broward banking power Alan Levan, now embroiled in legal warfare in federal bankruptcy court. The latest turn is Levan's charge that Catalfumo has engaged in "fraudulent transfer of more than $64.5 million dollars" to offshore banking accounts to avoid paying his creditors.

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A Texas-based Tea Party organization and the St. Lucie County Supervisor of Elections have agreed on a plan to provide the group access to county voting records from the 2012 federal election and voter registration and other records going back to 2009.

See also:
- Allen West Will Soon Be an Ex-Congressman

Planning an audit "unprecedented in that it will be led not by government entities or political parties, but by concerned citizens," the organization, True the Vote, said in a news release that it can now begin "reconstruction and review" of the congressional race between confessed torturer Allen West and Congressman Patrick Murphy in order to understand "exactly what happened before, during and after" the race. (We can tell them what happened: West lost.)

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Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw's counter-terror tattletale program C-PAT (Community Partners Against Terrorism) first drew widespread attention in late April, with news of a $1 million grant of state money for "Prevention Intervention" units to act preemptively on tips gathered from the program.

C-PAT's soft opening was in mid-April, courtesy of YouTube, with a video that begins with a prelude about the 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt, in which a Senegalese street merchant tipped off police about a smoking vehicle. One minute in, Bradshaw appears on-screen to announce that "history repeats itself" and that "one person's observation and the ability to act on instinct that something is 'not quite right' can save hundreds and even thousands of lives." The full, Orwellian substance of the program is outlined in the video's final six minutes.

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