The Culture of Life vs. the Cult of Death, Personality, Secrecy and Unaccountability

Dr. King said St. Augustine was "the most lawless" city in America, as first reported by John Herbers in the New York Times on June 6, 1964. On April 24, 2006, St. Augustine City Commissioner Joseph Boles, a lawyer, moved to seek to force a citizen to pay the City's attorney fees for what he termed a "frivolous lawsuit" to "make sure we don't encourage these kinds of lawsuits. Commissioners did not discuss the nature of the lawsuit. The case, brought pro se by Dr. Dwight Hines, Ph.D., a retired Jacksonville University professor, seeks to order the City's mandatory compliance with records laws, sometimes called "Sunsine laws." The text of Dr. Hines' lawsuit may be read by scrolling to the bottom of the blog and clicking on the first comment. As the formerly reform City Commissioners prove to be authoritarian, hierarchical facsimiles of their predecessors, they rush to justify the actions of City-Manager-for-Life WILLIAM B. HARRISS. Last night's vote is an act of defiance and ugliness. The fact that all Commissioners went along with Commissioner Boles' amendment shows conscious parallelism -- it's the Commissioners against the public interest. As they have no excuse for police abuses that resulted in a man being left a quadriplegic -- or 20,000 cubic yards of contaminants dumped in the old City reservoir -- they show themselves to be hostile to the culture of life. They represent a cult of personality, death, secrecy and unaccountability. Whether polluting our land and water or rubberstamping the City Manager (and developers' plans to destroy the beauty and archeological integrity of the Red House Bluff), their ukases never cease to amaze. Several of them ran for election using the word "rubberstamp." They have become what they decried. The new boss is the same as the old boss -- Mr. Harriss, coronated without competition on April 13, 1998.