Your Morning Sift [UPDATED]

Good morning.

It's been raining hard here in Broward since oh-dark-thirty this morning. It's welcomed, don't get me wrong, but I can see a lot of problems for those who waited until today to get their Thanksgiving supplies. So dry off and take a look at your Day Before Thanksgiving morning Sift...

A- South Florida Watershed Journal's famous last words...

It’s been a dry fall so far down on the peninsula.

B- South Florida Theatre Scene posts their regular review of the week.

C- Food for Thought tells us what he made with his first CSA delivery.

I have already learned one CSA lesson: greens wilt quickly. After only a few days, the callaloo was looking pretty sad and droopy, and some of the leaves just didn't make it. After seeing what could be salvaged, there wasn't enough to make a traditional callaloo soup, so I went in a different but related direction.

D- Eye on Miami continues with their mantra.

It is literally impossible for the mainstream media to keep pace with the complex intertwining of foreclosures, bankruptcies, and the connections of power brokers now fallen on hard times to politicians who sold the state down the river in order to plow unneeded development into "cheap" agricultural and environmentally sensitive wetlands. In November 2010, voters will have a chance to vote, for the first time, on how growth has been mismanaged in Florida. If voters are smart, they will strip from municipal officials the blank check that the Growth Machine writes for incumbent local elected officials in exchange for favorable decisions on zoning changes that shape the future development of communities. No one has a right to destroy the economy the way the drunken fools did, with ours.

E- Miami Beach 411 wonders what former Mayor Manny Diaz's legacy will be.

Of course, many in what were once residential areas are not exactly looking back on what Diaz did as progress. One woman in the article laments the loss of her once quiet residential area on Coral Way to gargantuan condo towers that destroyed its feel. So not only was the skyline permanently scarred, but so were many neighborhoods. And for what?

One can’t even argue that much money was made, since we all see how profitable the endless condo towers have been for their developers. Yes, Diaz did succeed in bringing some semblance of life to downtown, but that goal could have been easily accomplished with half as many buildings. I’m pretty sure if we went ahead and demoed every building built in Brickell after 2005, we’d be just fine.

F- Carlos Miller films The Burger Beast's effort to down a 4 pound burger at Quickies.

G- Bark Bark Woof Woof on Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin has chosen the celebrity path. She may have gotten into politics for all of the right reasons -- to improve the lives of her fellow citizens and make Alaska a better place -- but the limelight killed that off, and she willingly traded off her political capital for the money she could make selling books, touring the country in a big bus, and getting her picture on the cover of Newsweek. People flock to see her and buy her book whether or not they agree with her views on the issues; most of them probably don't know what they are or are unable to articulate them. In doing so, she's sacrificed any coherent political foundation for the thin veneer of fame. There's nothing wrong with that; a lot of people get off on that kind of thing. But she shouldn't try to convince us that she did it unwillingly, and she can't blame other people for giving her the attention she craved. It's like hearing a celebrity whining about not having any time to be "themselves." It's too late: that's who you are.

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I totally forgot to include A Grand Illusion's post where they get "the treatment" from babalu.

Looks like babalu's overlords have decided to extend us the same honor they extended to SFDB before: links from AGI to Babalu posts are being redirected to Shrub’s presidential library’s website.

Puerile, laughable and ineffectual (it doesn’t even work on every browser), but that’s hardliners for you. Not secure enough in their convictions to test them in a real battlefield of ideas. Instead they insult, bully, belittle, censor and ban anybody who doesn’t join their little Greek chorus. Just take a look at the comments in any of their posts. The last time I saw so many people toeing the party line it was in communist Cuba.

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