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Flagler, Florida and Beyond
Pierre Tristam | May 3, 2012
Anyone other than my doctor who’d ask me to pee in a cup isn’t just out of line. He’d be out of his mind. Yet an entire industry thrives on such cup-holders, Gov. Rick Scott among them, and millions of Americans are not only complying with the docility of circus animals. They’re encouraging the indignity and asking for more.
Pierre Tristam | April 8, 2012
The Supreme Court’s decision allowing the strip-searching of anyone booked into jail–no matter how small the charge, no matter the presumption of innocence of the accused–is merely the latest in a long series of constitutional violations, enshrined by conservative justices.
Pierre Tristam | March 25, 2012
The U.S. Supreme Court’s ban on television cameras or live audio feed for its arguments, including this week’s on the health law, is absurd. The justices opposition to cameras rests on shabby reasoning and stuffed up conceits.
Pierre Tristam | March 18, 2012
Florida lawmakers and their local replicas seem hypnotized by the buzz of economic development, nattering about it with great stamina. But it’s a hoax, and a costly one. The assault on public and higher education of the last few years proves it.
Pierre Tristam | March 9, 2012
The homecoming picture of the gay Marine kissing his boyfriend has the same iconic feel as Alfred Eisenstaedt’s Life magazine shot of the sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day. Both images capture the essence of liberation on a large scale.
Pierre Tristam | February 11, 2012
Veterans complained to the Flagler County School Board that student portrayals of Lady Liberty they say at FPC “desecrated” her and the flag and should be removed. The veterans were wrong, and were themselves desecrating American values.
Pierre Tristam | February 3, 2012
The Susan J. Komen foundation had a choice with Planned Parenthood: Stick with rational neutrality or surrender to the political contamination of reactionaries’ echo chambers and the bogus war on abortion. Komen surrendered. The war on cancer–the only war worth fighting–and women will suffer.
Pierre Tristam | February 1, 2012
No wonder so many people don’t see the point in voting. While the rest of us play one man, one vote in democracy’s delusional sandbox, a bunch of donors who add up to a cocktail party’s guest list are sealing the campaign’s fate.
Pierre Tristam | January 29, 2012
Saul Alinsky: a profile of the author of “Rules for Radicals,” dead since 1972, whom Newt Gingrich names as the reason to oppose Barack Obama. But the Saul Alinsky Gingrich creates never existed. The invention is more revealing of Gingrich than it is of Alinsky. A corrective to both.
Pierre Tristam | January 23, 2012
Internet cafés may be a pest, and their proponents make laughable arguments when they claim they’re not about gambling. But it’s not government’s business to ban them while swinging from the lottery’s levers. Regulation is the key.
Pierre Tristam | January 16, 2012
Florida’s proposed “Religious Freedom” amendment and a bill that would enable prayer at public school events project the false impression that religious expression in the public sphere is under siege, when the reverse is closer to the mark–as a bias particularly favoring Christianity.
Pierre Tristam | January 6, 2012
In their war on TLC’s “All-American Muslim,” a few aberrant fools at the Florida Family Association are yearning for “No Muslims Allowed” signs everywhere and smearing this state’s reputation while drafting Lowe’s to their bigoted crusade.
Pierre Tristam | January 3, 2012
Obama is reelected, the world doesn’t end except for Tim Tebow, Jim Landon and Sharon Atack look for other jobs and the News-Journal goes into the cemetery business: predictions worthy of James Ussher.
Pierre Tristam | December 15, 2011
We can all afford less tax coddling and more fiscal responsibility. But don’t expect to hear that from allegedly conservative Republican and our blandly, irresponsibly centrist president, who’s bribing his way to a second term.
Pierre Tristam | December 11, 2011
In Everyman, this is the Philip Roth writing the eulogy from behind the ordinariness, the Roth who reads hearts like America’s best social cardiologist, still writing like it’s a midday office tryst he can pull off with as much virility as Portnoy in his prime.
Pierre Tristam | December 9, 2011
Obama’s version of Roosevelt Lite won’t cut it if he can’t back up his rhetoric with a more serious program of defending the middle class against corporate predators and rich-class irresponsibility.
Pierre Tristam | December 2, 2011
There’s a very simple way to ensure that this country goes the way of old, bankrupt empires, and it doesn’t take flying planes into building or suckering the world’s mightiest military into pointless wars halfway around the globe. All it takes is voting Republican.
Pierre Tristam | November 27, 2011
Tom Wicker, the Times columnist for 25 years, wrote as if he’d seen the country’s best days. He probably had even then, having witnessed the eight years of Reagan taking out a second, third and fourth mortgage on the nation’s prosperity while making Americans feel like a million bucks.
Pierre Tristam | November 20, 2011
The Flagler County School Board’s push for uniforms is out of touch with the county’s struggling families and plundered budgets and revealing of a board too prone to selling out to charter-school gimmickry.
Pierre Tristam | November 12, 2011
This week’s dismal voter turn-out for the Palm Coast election is a reflection of a city and a council that mirror each other in laziness, misplaced penny-pinching and indifference to civic engagement where it actually matters.
Pierre Tristam | November 3, 2011
There’s nothing “fair and balanced” about local media’s failure to have reported on the $500 Waste Pro donation to DeLorenzo before it was pointed out to them–or continuing attempts to paper over the ethics and judgment breach with partial rationales.
Pierre Tristam | October 28, 2011
Watching Republican candidates debate taxes and creationism on TV reminds me of original Star Trek episodes featuring those low-tech aliens that nevertheless managed to speak English every time.
Pierre Tristam | October 21, 2011
Chest-thumping illusions aside, there wasn’t much difference between the killing of Qaddafi and the killing of bin Laden, and America’s coddling of other Arab dictators carries on.
Pierre Tristam | October 9, 2011
The re-introduction of Tasers on campus is disturbing on many levels, not least because the Flagler school board had no evidence they were needed. Nor did it consider the barbaric implications of Tasers in school settings.
Pierre Tristam | September 25, 2011
Parents who run their homes like North Korea aside, it is literally impossible to ban a book in America anymore. An excerpt from Pierre Tristam’s Banned Book Week address on Sept. 26 to the Friends of the Library in Palm Coast.
Pierre Tristam | September 18, 2011
The Obama administration’s attempts to block Palestinian statehood at the United Nations scorn American ideals and pander to Israel’s insistence on denying Palestinians’ right to exist. The outcome will be ruinous.
Pierre Tristam | September 11, 2011
Moving tributes and grief aside, one lesson of the last 10 years is that we have yet to learn the lesson of the last 10 years: we are not only on a spiral downward. We are feeding the spiral, collectively and consciously. We should all be mourners, and not just for 9/11’s victims.
Pierre Tristam | September 11, 2011
Revulsion over the losses in New York and Washington aside, the attack triggered a succession of fears: That the barbarism I so gladly left behind 23 years ago is here.
Pierre Tristam | September 9, 2011
What jobs program? Obama’s surrender to stimulus by tax cuts is another concession to bully superstitions. Obama has lost credibility. He’s lost respect. He’s losing the nation right along with him.
Pierre Tristam | August 25, 2011
Palm Coast City Councilman Holsey Moorman reacts to his vandalized sign, Democrats explain why they invited Jon Netts and not Charlie Ericksen, and the complete list of candidates thinking (or not) of challenging Kimberle Weeks, the Flagler County Supervisor of Elections.
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