How trite! St. Augustine Record 12/23 article on former CIty Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS

WILLIAM B. HARRISS is at right; ex-Commissioner DONALD CRICHLOW is at left.

The St. Augustine WRecKord did it again last Thursday. It being the eve of Christmas Eve, I neglected to mention it, out of a spirit of Christian charity, I suppose.

On the eve of Christmas Eve, it published another mash note to former City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS. See below. As my mother would say about such a non-article (on the front page), "how trite!" So WILLIAM HARRISS likes to hide in trees and shoot Bambi's father. How revealing. So WILLIAM B. HARRISS likes to play golf. How indescribably dull.

Just as when HARRISS retired, there was no mention of Environmental Racism; malign neglect of Lincolnville and West Augustine African-American communities; dumping 40,000 cubic yards of solid waste in our Old City Reservoir in West Augustine and seeking to bring it back to Lincolnville for a "park"; dumping semi-treated sewage effluent into our saltwater marsh for years through a "pipe" that was more like a sieve (300 feet missing); emitting hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage into our San Sebastian River; habitual caving-in to tree-killing, wetland-destroying "developers" like ROBERT MICHAEL GRAUBARD (who has since left town); renewal of cable TV and electric power francise agreements on terms unfavorable to the City and consumers; habitual no-bid contracts and Sunshine and Open Records violations; and emotional, hostile responses to First Amendment protected activity by everyone from artiss and entertainers to speakers at City Commission meetings.

For that, you would have to read this blog.

But I reckon St. Augustine now has a real newspaper, to uncover what the St. Augustine WRecKord habitually covers up. In fact, the next issue of the St. Augustine Underground is out Friday, December 31, 2010. St. Augustine Underground is published by the Milwaukee Journal, and is ably edited by Ponte Vedra Recorder editor Mark Pettus.

Here's a New Year's cheer for the St. Augustine Underground, which we hope fulfills what our Founders had in mind in adopting our First Amendment.

As U.S. District Judge Murray Gurfein, a Nixon appointee serving his first day on the bench, wrote as the trial judge in the Pentagon Papers case, the “security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know." U. S. v. New York Times Co., 328 F. Supp. 324, 325 (S.D.N.Y. 1971)(Gurfein, J.).