I should start a whole new category of posts about why I’m probably never headed back to Florida. I think there must be an enormous amount of phony liberalism in the northeast. It seems that the more immigration Florida gets from that part of the country, the more conservative it gets. Anyway, latest on my list of reasons not to go back is this.

Tom Vilsack, we hardly knew ya.

Vilsack, quite simply, couldn’t raise the money to run a viable campaign.

As a frequent flyer who is often around other frequent flyers, I’ve had this conversation dozens of times in the last year: all the airport security is a crock. It isn’t designed to provide real security. It’s there to provide the appearance of security. We put in obvious and often stupid measures to look like we’re fighting the last major threat whether that’s shoe bombing, liquids, or flying a plane into a building. Wired writer Bruce Schneier expands on this theme and writes that most of the security various government agencies have implemented over the last five years is there to serve one purpose: Cover Your Ass.

I watched Mitt Romney on several newstalk shows this week. He’s pretty slick. He’s well spoken. If the guy had stuck to being a pro-choice, pro-gay rights guy who also happened to be a successful pro-business guy, I think he’d have a viable shot at the presidency–as a Democrat. Maybe not this year, but who knows. He’s a powerful fundraiser. He’ll raise enough money to be seen as a serious candidate until the votes start coming in. He might even do okay in Iowa and New Hampshire.

He should have stuck to what he believed and switched parties instead of trying to tack right and stay a Republican. Had he done that, he could have been a two-term governor of Massachusetts which looks better than being a one termer who had no shot at getting re-elected. He could have used the Bill Clinton strategy of walking a little to the right during his last couple of years in his last term while he was running for the presidency. Trying to do that in one term makes you look both incredibly cynical and politocally weak. You’ve got some chance, as a Democrat, at getting southern Baptist Democrats to vote for a mormon if he’s vague and ecumenical in his use of religious language. As a guy with strong ties to Massachusetts and Michigan, he wouldn’t be in a bad spot as a Democrat. John McCain and and Rudy Giuliani both have to implode for Romney to have a real shot as a Republican, though.

I can say with little fear of being proven wrong that southern Baptists will vote for a pro-gay, pro-choice Rudy Giuliani before they’ll vote for a Mormon. I’d say this is especially true for a Mormon who used to be pro-gay and pro-choice who looks like he may have taken his right wing turn just so he can be president. McCain may be the presumptive front-runner, but I would actually give the edge to Giuliani at this point. Southerners have been skeptical of McCain in his past runs. I think his hawkier than Bush stance on Iraq in recent months is a calculated attempt at trying to court southern voters. I think it’s gonna backfire. Whether it’s deserved or not, I don’t think any Republican is going to paint themselves as better on terror than Giuliani.

William Rivers Pitt writes in a thoughtful piece on the Mooninite terror “hoax” in Boston (where he lives)that the Bush administration’s cynical manipulation of terror threats for political purposes while fomenting a war that will, inevitably, create more terrorists has left our younger generation in a bind: they know that a terror attack is likely and yet have reflexively grown to view terror warnings as a sucker’s game and one that you can’t fall for or take seriously. It’s also left a lot of our not so younger generation sitting with the idea in the back of our minds that the next terror attack is going to be the end of habeas corpus, posse comitatus, and constitutional rule in this country. That’s what he feared he may be seeing the beginning of when the media spent hours describing, but not showing pictures of “explosive devices” on highway overpasses and hospitals in Boston.

Nativism and anti-immigration sentiment is leading to a resurgence of the KKK, including many parts of the country outside of the South.

Don’t believe the hype that says we’ve hit a soft-landing in the real estate market. D.R. Horton is one of the nation’s largest homebuilders. In the 4th quarter of 2006, their cancellation rate was 40%. There’s currently $300 billion dollars worth of adjustable rate mortgages that are set to see their payments go up this year alone. Many of those payments could double. Housing prices in California, Nevada, Florida, and Arizona could easily fall by another 10% or more over the next couple of years.