Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

In after Baud. Damn.

Republicans do not trust women.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

In my day, never was longer.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

He really is that stupid.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Thursday Evening Open Thread: President Biden Visits Surfside

Thursday Evening Open Thread: President Biden Visits Surfside

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I don’t know how much credence to put in this interview, because it so closely conforms to my worst fears. But I think it’s worth reading:

Reader Interactions

97Comments

  2. 2.

    Baud

    Biden, in Florida, says he thinks the federal government may have the power to pick up 100% of the cost for the county and state’s expenses on the Surfside condo collapse rescue operation.

    This will only encourage other buildings to collapse.

  5. 5.

    Catherine D.

    Between 6 and 12 inches of movement?? Ja, you betcha suspend recovery operations.

  7. 7.

    Gvg

    Oh for Pete’s sake, the real estate market here is only partially condo’s and few are high rise percent wise. Condo’s aren’t really popular because everyone knows they are HOA’s on steroids. Miami is more urban dense than most of the state so they have many, especially beachfront. The state is mostly houses not condo’s.

  8. 8.

    Martin

    This wasn’t the cause, but it speaks to why Florida will turn into the land of stranded assets:

    And because it needed to be this collectivized kind of decision, they couldn’t reach that kind of decision and they couldn’t make the repairs that needed to be done.

    If climate change comes to my single family house, it’s on me how to address that. And if it consumes my house, that’s my responsibility and my loss. But if you’re a 4th floor condo owner, you are in many ways reliant on the 3rd floor and 5th floor owners for your security. And if your building needs millions in repairs and some condo owners are on fixed incomes, or took a loss in the market, or blew all of their savings on a hip replacement? You can only force them to pay in to a certain degree.

    So you’re trapped. Collectively you might have the money to do the repairs, but you can’t distribute those costs evenly. So you find yourself in a cycle where you do nothing until the building falls down and now everyone has lost everything. Now, the insurance companies might have a role to play here, but if this is the canary in the coal mine – the first of many structural failures due to lack of enforcement by regulators or rising water tables, etc. they won’t be there to help for long.

    And how willing is New Jersey going to be to bail out the folks that fled the state for Florida and then neither paid into the tax base or into the maintenance of their own building?

  9. 9.

    debbie

    They need to inspect every damn building. Honest, ethical developer seems oxymoronic to me.

  12. 12.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @Baud: Thanks! I’m home from the hospital and an emergency appendectomy (is there any other kind?). Yesterday I was still on the good drugs, so felt fine. Today is a little more uncomfortable, but not terrible. It’s hard convincing the little dog that he can’t prance on my stomach when I’m lying down. :)

  13. 13.

    lollipopguild

    You mean President Biden did not toss paper towels at people? ( I am kidding!) If Deathsantis runs against tfg for the 2024 nomination trump will treat him with the same love and kisses that he gave both Clinton and Obama. The nomination is trump’s “precious”.

  14. 14.

    Martin

    @Gvg: Florida has more condos than any other state – even CA. Condos are about 5% of all residences in the US. Nearly 20% in Florida. ¼ of all condos in the United States are in Florida.

  19. 19.

    craigie

    Money quote from the Slate story:

    The state of Florida was basically considered a wasteland until developers figured out that they could sell the dream of Florida. I’m not exaggerating on this. Our economy over history has basically been a pyramid scheme of developers and people marketing the dream of Florida, to come down to Florida, it’s so beautiful, it’s so carefree. Well, now we have something to care about.

  23. 23.

    Mary G

    @O. Felix Culpa: I had to build an elaborate fort with a side table and pillows when I had my hip replaced. The cat was not happy to lose her resting place and acted out in various ways.

  24. 24.

    Ken

    Condos and the development of condos and the mortgage brokers that help get the financing, the insurers that insure, the realtors who sell, the investors who buy and flip—if Florida has one main driver of industry, this is it.

    Interesting, my Google Translate plugin just offered to translate that from Chamber of Commerce to English.  Wonder what will happen…

    Ever since that first con-man cheated some out-of-state ignoramus out of their life savings by selling them a tin shack sandwiched between the swamp and the ocean, shady real estate deals have been the main source of income for the collection of crooks and thieves that run Florida.

  28. 28.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Gvg: It’s going to be a huge problem. Think about where we’re talking about. Sure, we’ve got a lot of suburbs and exurbs and semi-rural and rural areas that are all single family homes, but we have a lot of places like this building in Surfside. You’ve got a lot of the incorporated little municipalities up and down Miami beach that have these types of building ranging in height from three to five stories up to the size of the Champlain. You’ve got the same thing in Miami proper in places like Brickel. You’ve got the same thing northeast in Broward and Palm Beach counties along the coast. All the way up to Jacksonville Beach. On the west coast you’ve got at least a dozen of these on Bayshore in Tampa interspersed with the old captain’s mansions. You’ve got at least a half dozen still on Davis Islands and probably that many on Harbor Island. For non Tampa residents the former are man made islands in the bay connected to Tampa proper by a bridge that were built and then developed in the 1960s. Harbor Island is another one of these that was done in the 80s, but is not connected to the three connected by bridges Davis Islands. You’ve got dozens of these up and down the barrier islands that run from the southwest tip of St. Pete up through Clearwater.

    And let’s be honest, most of the Home Owner’s Associations down here are similar in form, structure, and function to the condo associations. When you get a HOA board that decides that it isn’t going to spend money and wants to cut corners so they can cut fees, it is not only more costly in the long run, it can take several years to fix the entire mess. Ask me how I know…

  30. 30.

    Baud

    @Adam L Silverman:

    When you get a HOA board that decides that it isn’t going to spend money and wants to cut corners so they can cut fees, it is not only more costly in the long run, it can take several years to fix the entire mess.

    TIL the modern Republican Party is based on HOAs.

  31. 31.

    Ken

    @WaterGirl: That’s what I understood also, and with the (non-unanimous) blessing of the Supreme Court.  I’m kind of hoping someone will drop a phrase along the lines of “as the Holy Father and other religious leaders have stated, capital punishment is immoral…”

  33. 33.

    Gin & Tonic

    @O. Felix Culpa: Actually, there are non-emergency appendectomies – my dear wife had one. The surgeon was going to be in the neighborhood, and asked if she wanted it taken out while he was there.

  34. 34.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    After giving brief remarks, he went from table-to-table to speak individually with the relatives — as did Dr. Biden. Biden stayed until everyone had a chance to speak w/him

    You mean he didn’t toss rolls of paper towels to grieving or have his “wife” show up wearing a billboard stating her indifference.

    BOTH SIDES!

  36. 36.

    NotMax

    Open thread?

    As Missouri experiences a rise in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, state officials have requested aid from newly-formed federal “surge response teams” to assist communities struggling with low vaccination rates as the virulent Delta variant spreads.
    [snip]
    Missouri state lawmakers on Wednesday threatened to effectively prohibit hospitals from requiring employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19. During a special session on Medicaid, the House briefly debated an amendment that would have stopped hospitals from challenging employees who request exemptions from vaccine mandates on religious or medical grounds.

    While the amendment was withdrawn, the debate itself underscored the unwillingness of some elected officials to aggressively push vaccines, even in the face of rapidly rising cases.

    As cases rise in Missouri, so have hospitalizations. While they remain under their winter high points, the current trends are concerning health officials who led overburdened doctors and nurses through a dark and chaotic winter.

    They are especially frustrated by rising case counts, given the widespread availability of vaccines. At Springfield-based CoxHealth, the number of virus patients in its southwest Missouri locations hovers near 100.

    “If you are making wildly disparaging comments about the vaccine, and have no public health expertise, you may be responsible for someone’s death. Shut up,” CoxHealth CEO Steve Edwards tweeted Thursday. Source

  37. 37.

    Adam L Silverman

    @craigie: Yep, and to answer AL’s question from the bottom of the post, I think that’s why that interview in Slate is legit. By the time the building they’re doing search and rescue on was built back in the late 1980s/early 1990s it had passed through several different developers. Every major building project, residential or commercial, in Miami, in Tampa, in Ft. Lauderdale, in Palm Beach, in Daytona, in Jacksonville and Jacksonville Beach, in Orlando, in Pinellas County (St. Pete and Clearwater and 8 or 9 other smaller municipalities), and other places in Florida are started, the developer declares bankruptcy, cuts his losses, sells the project to another developer to protect the initial investment and whatever profits have been made, and then the process repeats. Sometime three times. Sometimes five or six times. Sometimes even more. The attempt to build a Trump Tower in Tampa on the Bayshore overlooking where the Hillsborough River meets the bay was exactly like this. When Trump and his partners couldn’t make it work, their local developer took that project into bankruptcy, sold everything to another developer, and it started over. That thing went through three or four iterations before the thing was finally built. And it was never built under Trump branding. Some of the people that made an initial deposit for a condo/apartment in the building kept their money in and after many repeated delays got the condo/apartment they wanted. Many pulled out and lost a lot of money. But this is how development is done in Florida. And remember, the developers are incentivized to operate this way because of specific tax breaks just for them and for specific portions of the bankruptcy code just for them.

  39. 39.

    Gvg

    @craigie: Bull. Florida gets some money from developers selling the dream to out of staters, but that migration slowed a lot starting….about 20 years ago. A majority live here and we’re either born or have been here for decades. We have jobs families and all the rest and everyone wants to buy a nicer house than they have, until they get older and downsize. Most of the real estate market here is just like the rest of the country, it’s just there is a very advertised extra layer of selling to the gullible. Beachfront condo’s now that is full of scams yes. But suburban neighborhoods with working and professional families who want good schools and a bearable commute are just like everywhere else and not full of the Florida dream nonsense. Well people do like orange trees for Florida  lifestyle, but there is no problem with that. Go down to Home Depot and get one.

  40. 40.

    Baud

    @Gin & Tonic:

    The surgeon was going to be in the neighborhood, and asked if she wanted it taken out while he was there.

    Appendectomy trucks > taco trucks.

  42. 42.

    NotMax

    FYI (WaPo link).

    U.S. arrests more than a dozen in Capitol riot, among the most made public in a single day
    [snip]
    The surge of at least 13 new or unsealed arrests came as the FBI and Justice Department highlighted developments in the criminal probe nearing six months after the event, and the House voted to create a select committee to investigate the Capitol breach.

    Those swept up in recent days reflected a cross-section of defendants whose motives allegedly varied, although several allegedly sought out affiliations with extremist groups anticipating violence, the government said. Newly unsealed charges included trespassing and violent police assaults, and the defendants included George Tenney III, of Anderson, S.C., accused of being the first to open the east Capitol Rotunda doors from the inside, allowing the mob to enter.

    “You’re not gonna stop us,” Tenney told an employee of the House sergeant-at-arms who struggled to pull the door closed, the FBI alleged.
    [snip]
    Also in court Wednesday, prosecutors asked to jail a previously charged defendant, now-fired Rocky Mount, Va., police officer Thomas Robertson, saying that since being charged with a co-worker for trespassing at the Capitol, he has acquired 34 guns he stored at a local gun dealership despite a court order that he should not possess firearms while on pretrial release, and that he was found with a partially assembled pipe bomb in a box labeled “Booby Trap.
    [snip]
    Robertson’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Source

  43. 43.

    Adam L Silverman

    @debbie: @Gin & Tonic: This is a different thing. Biden just politically neutralized him just by being Biden. Look at DeSantis’s body language and his facial expressions both when Biden is telling everyone he’s going to try to make sure the Federal government picks up all the costs, that he’ll ensure they get everything they need in terms of help and support, that this is evidence we can put political differences aside and pull together as Americans, and when DeSantis thanks him and states Biden has been extremely responsive.

    DeSantis is not sure how to respond to any of this because it can’t be responded to with the political persona he’s adopted over the past several years to appeal to Trump’s supporters.

    And if DeSantis does decide to run against Biden in 2024 and he goes after him as out of it, out of touch, and not doing anything for the average American he knows, you can see it on his face that he knows, that these clips will be repurposed as attack ads to knock him back.

  44. 44.

    Mike in NC

    It was on a visit to Saint Augustine a few years ago that we learned the story of Henry Flagler, a wealthy industrialist and developer who fell in love with Florida in the 1880s and began to build hotels and railroads there. He even built a railroad that ran from Miami to Key West. It opened in 1912 but was destroyed by a massive hurricane in 1935.

    After visiting Key West last month I read “Last Train to Paradise”, which details how the railroad was constructed. On the back cover there were several endorsements, including one by a certain Donald Trump. As if he’s read any books since high school.

  46. 46.

    trollhattan

    Meanwhile, California will be having our fucking recall election September 14 to decide whether Newsom can continue doing his damn job. If not, some lucky dart target from what will be scores of candidates will take over. For a year and a couple months.

    Fucking Republicans, can’t win an election so they pull this garbage.

    Per estimates from all California counties, we will spend $276 million for the pleasure of finding out whether we keep the governor we have or get a brand new governor. Yay us.

    Make it illegal to pay for gathering signatures and this goes away, along with most of our propositions and initiatives.

  48. 48.

    Ken

    @Adam L Silverman: It’s still a few days away, but the forecast for tropical storm Elsa has it heading toward Florida, so DeSantis may have some more photo ops with Biden in his future.

  49. 49.

    Soprano2

    @NotMax: I’m here to tell you,  that Steve Edwards “Shut up” is like me saying “go fuck yourself”. That’s the strongest language I’ve seen him use. He’s totally frustrated with the idiots here. He’s been the voice of reason and sanity through the whole Covid crisis. I think he’s why we had the health measures we did. He’s a true hero.

  50. 50.

    trollhattan

    @NotMax:

    We have an “area man” in jail on charges from 1/6 who is being denied bail because the judge considers him too dangerous and a flight risk.

    “Very fine people.”

  52. 52.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Baud: Basically, about four years ago my HOA decided it was going to go full on Paul Ryan and Freedom Caucus. They made huge promises about what they could achieve while cutting everyone’s fees, screamed down everyone who called them out while they were running for their positions on the board. And then they ran everything into the ground very quickly. The woman, who we think was cheating on her husband with two of the guys she was aligned with on the board, moved out of the neighborhood after reality set in and people got pissed and moved to restructure the board, one of the other guys did too. One of them still lives in the neighborhood, but he avoids everyone else and no one really talks to him anymore. No one on that old board is on the current board or the past two boards. Everything was financially fixed, fortunately nothing majorly bad happened. But several of us saw the scam a mile away, warned everyone else there was no free lunch, and were ignored.

  54. 54.

    Roger Moore

    @trollhattan:

    Make it illegal to pay for gathering signatures and this goes away, along with most of our propositions and initiatives.

    Unfortunately, this has already been litigated, and they can’t restrict paid petition circulators.  I agree it would be great if we could, but that ship has already circumnavigated the globe.

  55. 55.

    Adam L Silverman

    @debbie: No. Same with high rise business towers down here. All of it works the same way. Same with strip malls, regular malls, professional centers. All of it is done the same way down here.

  56. 56.

    SectionH

    @trollhattan:   “Make it illegal to pay for gathering signatures and this goes away, along with most of our propositions and initiatives.”

    THIS! 40 million times or more. Yeah I know…

  57. 57.

    Adam L Silverman

    @NotMax: Actually, I’ve seen the evidentiary photo of Robertson’s pipe bomb and he had written “Bobby Trap”. Frankly, the most disturbing portion the account of what Robertson has been up to is that he either can’t spell booby or that he wants to blow up someone named Bobby.

  59. 59.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Ken: Believe me, I am paying attention. Because we’re too many days out to know with any certainty where it’s going once it goes past Cuba, right now it is forecast to come my way.

  60. 60.

    Spanky

    @NotMax:

    and that he was found with a partially assembled pipe bomb in a box labeled “Booby Trap.

    And Wile E. Coyote suddenly springs to mind.

  64. 64.

    Roger Moore

    @Baud: ​
     

    TIL the modern Republican Party is based on HOAs.

    Sure. HOAs* are, at their core, about privatizing government. They provide many of the same kinds of services a municipal government would, even private security in the place of police in the fancier neighborhoods. Of course the people who pay for those things through their HOA dues don’t want to pay again through taxes, so they vote against any kind of tax that would help anyone outside their HOA. Once the city government is incapable of providing basic services, people are forced to have HOAs just to get decent services. It’s a vicious cycle.
    *At least neighborhood HOAs. Something like a HOA is essential if you want an apartment-style condominium like the Champlain Towers South that necessarily has a large shared property.

  65. 65.

    Hoppie

    @Roger Moore: We could initiate such a change though.  Perhaps by paying petition gatherers?  (I would gladly help collect for free though, but beyond my organizing capacity now.)

  69. 69.

    trollhattan

    Hah, Dahlkemper takes a shot. Never lose the dream, even keepers score from time to time.

  71. 71.

    trollhattan

    @Roger Moore:

    With the current court we can pass a law that LIBERALS CANNOT  pay to collect signatures and they’d uphold it.

    Baby steps. Camel’s nose. Slope that has a slippery condition. Etc.

  74. 74.

    trollhattan

    Hey East Hartford, Connecticut, can you send us a few of those rainclouds?

    Thx

  76. 76.

    Martin

    @debbie: Logically it should be. The upside with condo construction is that the developer sells the asset and doesn’t have to deal with the fully predictable consequences of a condo board not doing maintenance.

    Hotels, like a lot of other industries (McDonalds, Target, etc.)  are at their core real-estate enterprises. Owning the asset is as much of the business as renting out the room, so there’s really no point in cutting corners.

  82. 82.

    trollhattan

    NATO member says, “Hi ladies, you are treasured here.”

    “Turkey formally withdrew Thursday from a landmark international treaty protecting women from violence, and signed in its own city of Istanbul, though President Recep Tayyip Erdogan insisted it won’t be a step backward for women,” the Associated Press reports.

  84. 84.

    trollhattan

    @Ken:

    “That appendix was a freeloader. Good riddance!”

    –The Libertarian Bible, Rand 3:4

  86. 86.

    J R in WV

    @Gin & Tonic: 

    My Wife also had a non-emergency appendectomy during another procedure– turned out it was a really good thing, her appendix was in a very unusual place, nearly up behind her liver.

    So if she had appendicitis, it would have been difficult to diagnose, and could well have led to serious problems.

    This was a very long time ago… in the 1970s.

  88. 88.

    J R in WV

    My parents spent several winters in various Florida neighborhoods after they retired, trying to learn enough to make an educated choice. One was in a high-rise on Siesta Key in Sarasota, one winter in a similar high-rise condo in Key West, both of which we visited while they were there. One winter in Naples, which we didn’t visit.

    Finally they bought two units in a low-rise spread out condo in Osprey, down near Venice, south of  Sarasota. Soon after dad learned that he wasn’t allowed to own a motorcycle, which he never really wanted until the HOA told him he couldn’t have one!

    They also had a big assessment  to rebuild the siding, as gtropical insects had eaten most of the siding… the one for the roof! Dad was pissed, but it was beautiful, plantings, etc. They were right beside the pool, which dad loved, and had enough room for all their relatives to visit, which we did, most winters.

    They were just a little way inland from the Intracoastal Waterway, with a drawbridge over to Casey Key, another tropical wonderland covered with amazing plants and houses in their own private jungles. There was a seafood joint beside the drawbridge, where you could get oysters 2 for a buck, and a beer for $0.75 — was paradise in some ways.

    Ringling Bros circus was still wintering in Venice at the time. The gym we joined one winter, there were a ton of circus folks there to work out to stay in shape for their acts. Many had bullet wounds and very little English, escapees from Central Europe back when there was still an Iron Curtain.

    They sold out in the early 1990s. Mom couldn’t travel any more. But I learned not to invest in an area with an active HOA. The developed ranch we’re on in AZ has verbiage about an HOA in the deeds, but all the owners are anarchists, totally unwilling to tolerate an HOA, and willing to use neighborhood pressure to force anyone talking about starting an HOA to shut up about it. There is nothing for an HOA to maintain out there, anyway.

  90. 90.

    The Pale Scot

    @Adam L Silverman:

    The woman, who we think was cheating on her husband with two of the guys she was aligned with on the board, moved out of the neighborhood after reality set in and people got pissed and moved to restructure the board, one of the other guys did too.

    Ah.. Florida

    Which why I’ve been mostly celibate, and my two age similar cousins who moved here said WTF, everybody is out of their fourth marriage. Most RC Irish don’t give a fuck anymore. But God man/woman think!

  92. 92.

    MontyTheClipArtMongoose

    @NotMax: how much money has steven edwards donated to haw-haw hawley’s national-conservative presidency-in-waiting?

    seems like stevie e needs to shut the fuck up too.

  93. 93.

    MontyTheClipArtMongoose

    @trollhattan: the democrat party can claim the first nonwhite president & woman vice president, but the gqp gets the nation’s first trans chief executive.

    cry more, libs!

  95. 95.

    LiminalOwl

    @craigie: Do you know the early Marx Brothers fim The Cocoanuts?

    ”You can’t fool me. There ain’t no Sanity Clause.”

  96. 96.

    NotMax

    @LiminalOwl

    For the record, that one is from A Night at the Opera.

    Cocoanuts has the shpiel about real estate in Florida. “You can even get stucco. Oh, how you can get stuck-o.”

  97. 97.

    lowtechcyclist

    @craigie: ​

    Cocoanut Manor, no snow, no ice!-Marx Brothers, 1925
    @Adam L Silverman: ​
     

    When you get a HOA board that decides that it isn’t going to spend money and wants to cut corners so they can cut fees, it is not only more costly in the long run, it can take several years to fix the entire mess. Ask me how I know…

    Seems totally nuts to me that the maintenance of a high-rise is left in the hands of what is basically an HOA.

    I’m on the board of my HOA, but it’s a neighborhood of single-family homes. We have some common areas that the HOA is the owner of, but other than the land itself, all we own is a softball backstop and a couple of soccer goals. It’s the sort of situation that, whatever one’s opinion might be of HOAs, an HOA can handle that level of responsibility. It’s hard to see how that works for a high-rise.

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