Something Green (and Gray) to Include in Your Visit to Florida

So many people visit Orlando and go straight to the theme parks. There is something else you might want to see when you come to Florida. It is fascinating and unique and you can see it by taking just a 30 minute drive north of Orlando. If you make the effort you'll be able to enjoy a visit with the unusual and rare mammal called the manatee.
Florida is just one of three places in the world where you can see this strange-looking gentle creature. It is the only marine mammal that is an herbivore (it grazes on green things), and though it is sometimes called a sea cow, its closest relative is the elephant. Like the elephant it is the largest creature in its habitat: the average adult manatee is 10 feet long (2.5 to 4.5 meters) and weighs about 1,000 lbs (200 to 600 kg). This is a very large creature to come across in a river.

The Florida manatee is a subspecies of the West Indian Manatee or Trichechus manatus. It is one of three species of related sea-going mammals of the order Sirenia. That name harks back to stories told by early sailors who mistook the manatee for the "sirens" of Greek legend--mermaids who lured ships onto the rocks. As it turns out, manatees are much too friendly to do any such evil luring, and the animals don't look anything like beautiful mermaids. Clearly, sailors who were away from women for years at a time developed vivid imaginations.

The manatee is so large it has no natural enemies and its brain isn't programmed to fear. Consequently, these animals are curious and very friendsly toward their land-based cousins, the primates. You aren't allowed to swim with them and bother them, as they are protected by federal and state law, but people who accidentally come upon them in Florida rivers and streams report they seem to love swimming near humans and will roll over on their backs like dogs and practically purr if you scratch their tummies.

Unfortunately, some humans have not been friendly in return. A cousin of the manatee, the Stellar Sea Cow was hunted to extinction in the 18th century. The Florida manatee faces most of its challenges from humans in the environment: watercraft propellers and impact injuries are the leading causes of manatee deaths. Pollution also kills them. The good ecological news is that after a low of a few hundred in the 1970s, their number in Florida has now risen to about 3000.

The manatee disperses throughout the South in the hot summer days. But as winter approaches and the water in rivers and streams cools down, they head for the warm springs in Florida's interior.

Blue Spring State Park is one of these and one of the easiest to get to from Orlando. It is still early in the cool season, but my family and I went to Blue Spring recently and there were 17 manatee visiting the spring that day, all easy to spot and all relaxing in the 72 F degree water. The water is so clear there you can see right through it, and the manatees float under water sleeping during much of the day. After five or ten minutes they slip to the surface to breathe, exhale and inhale without awakening, and go back down for some more rest.

If you wait 'til December and January, more than a hundred manatees will be in Blue Spring, and the manatee watching is the best it is all year. There are picnic tables for your family, a place for swimming, and there are canoes and kayaks to rent (except at the height of the manatee season when canoeing might interfere with the manatee habitat). The park has 15 minute presentations throughout the day and an informative little movie you can watch to learn more.

To reach Blue Spring head east from Orlando on Interstate 4, exit at the Orange City/Blue Spring State Park exit and follow the signs.

Here is the park's Web Site. Rangers count the manatees each day and will post the count on the site: http://www.floridastateparks.org/bluespring/

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Florida Still in Play and the "Biltmore Effect"

McCain-Palin signs on a rainy day in Florida, and the Arizona Biltmore, about the time of its opening in 1929.

A new Mason-Dixon poll, released this week, shows Republican Presidential candidate John McCain leading Democratic candidate Barak Obama 46 percent to 45 percent in the crucial state of Florida. With a margin of error plus-or-minus four percent, it means Florida remains a dead heat. Until this week, all the election polls so far showed Obama with a lead over McCain in Florida.

Florida is an historically Republican state. But as the ballot debacle of the year 2000 suggests: a tight race in Florida is not out of the question. McCain’s strongest showing in the new poll is in what is known in Florida as the I-4 corridor, the area between Tampa on the Gulf Coast, and Daytona Beach on the Atlantic, where Interstate-4 slices through the state. The new poll shows McCain leading Obama 47 percent to 44 percent in this central part of Florida. Since McCain must win Florida to win in the Electoral College, this new poll is a bit of good news for Republicans.

Of more concern, should be a tiny item stuck in a tiny corner of this morning’s paper: John McCain’s press staff has told reporters that he won’t be making a statement at the big election night party being held for him at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix. He’ll be giving his statement at a press site on the lawn of the hotel. The McCain staff noted difficulties with the size of the room in which the event is being held, but you don’t have to have the nose of a bloodhound to suspect that something about this announcement has a distinctive odor to it. The tracking polls must be showing McCain’s staff that he will be losing on election night and thus McCain is planning to make a quick concession statement on the lawn and then go home to bed (he’s 72 after all and probably hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in months); or that the election is going to be too close to call so he will avoid making any statement until all the votes are counted, when the sun will be rising over the Arizona Biltmore and the party inside will long be over.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, but it is one of the most interesting hotels in America. Designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, and opened in 1929, it has all the weird and wonderful marks of a Wright Building: striated cement blocks, geometric angles, flat-ish roof lines and strange water features. Because it is an historic landmark, there have been limits placed on how the building can be modified, so there is an outside chance—pretty far outside if you ask not Joe-the-plumber but Robin-the-reporter—that some combination of room size and candidate stubbornness may be at play. It is possible.

But above and beyond the polls being released by the media, each campaign has its own much more detailed polling organizations. They know exactly how many votes they will need in specific precincts in specific swing states, exactly how voter turnout will impact their candidate and they have a very good idea, long before election night, what the election is going to look like. Thus the announcement from the McCain camp about the election night party is much more significant than it looks. Along with the so-called “Bradley Effect” in this presidential election (that voters don't always tell pollsters the truth when an African-American candidate is in the race), we might also find ourselves remembering the “Biltmore Effect.” Which means, if a candidate begins to act squirrely about his election night party, something definitely is up.

We're in the Money: We've Got a Lot of What it Takes to Get Along

There are many signs this week that the U.S. is headed for—or is already in the midst of—a deep recession. The Department of Labor reported this month that the net job loss in the U.S. over the last year was 760,000, with 159,000 of those jobs lost in September alone. A year ago, the unemployment rate was 4.7% and has now risen to 6.1%, the worst showing in seven years.

In Orlando, where the Walt Disney World Company has an entire staff devoted to projecting just how many people will visit each of its parks on any given day, hotel occupancy has made its largest single one month drop (September 2008 compared with September 2007) since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. That drop was nearly 12%, one of the worst year-to-year showings ever.

General Motors and Chrysler continue to be mum about reports that the two are talking about a merger, but what happens with these two auto giants could very well affect each one of us. GM lusts after Chrysler’s supply of cash (about $11 billion, most of it borrowed) and Chrysler isn’t making it financially and needs a partner in order to survive. But survival as what? If the two companies join forces, analysts believe that something like 66,000 jobs (mostly at Chrysler) will be “redundant,” which would mean at least that many people applying for unemployment. Auto Week reports that for each job lost on an assembly line, ten more jobs would be lost in related industries. You can do the math on that one.

And any deal between these two enormous companies would need an alphabet soup of approvals from the UAW (United Autoworkers Union) to the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) to the JD (Justice Department). And that’s just for starters. It could take up to a year to work through the details, if there is a deal at all, and during the delay, if sales continue to drop, more jobs would be lost.

In the meantime GMAC Credit, owned 49% by GM and 51% by the holding company that is the majority owner in Chrysler, has reported it lost billions in the mortgage crisis, and has closed 20 offices in North America and laid off 930 people. GMAC has also tightened its credit standards so that only those with a credit score of 700 or above can borrow money from GMAC to buy a new car. Nice to know George and Laura Bush, at least, will be able to afford new wheels when they move back to Texas.

Finally, analysts of the Auto Industry say no matter what happens they expect GM and Chrysler to appeal to the U.S. government for some kind of bailout, and that’s in addition to $25 billion in loans Congress gave the automakers in the recent Energy Bill, ostensibly so that they could begin to build more fuel efficient cars. It begs the question: how long can the U.S. treasury keep handing out money?

The U.S. Central Bank announced yesterday it is itself getting into the credit business, providing $540 billion in capital for money market mutual fund investment. This is designed to ease up on tightening credit (see above paragraphs) but now that we’ve seen how the for-profit banks, investment firms, and mortgage companies handled their assets in recent years, we can only imagine how efficient the federal government will be at this same job. And, on that same theme, yesterday Yahoo announced the layoff of 1500 employees. Financial firm National City Corporation let go 4000 employees.

It would take a great deal more bad news than we have seen so far to bring us to the 25% unemployment that marked the depths of the Great Depression. But it is very clear to me that in all the deregulation fervor of recent years, the federal regulatory agencies and Congress, as their watchdog, forgot what they were supposed to do. The mission statements of those agencies included preventing corruption and prosecuting it when discovered. Preventing ursury and predatory lending. Instead, we have seen every big corporation lining up at the Congressional trough, and (practically) every member of Congress lining up at the lobbying trough of every big corporation. A truly symbiotic relationship.

It is tough to imagine that anyone in the White House could really make much of an impact on this mess. I haven’t heard either of the candidates promise to seek out the bad guys who corrupted our system and put them in jail. It is almost as if one has to wait for the whole thing to fall in on itself before the system can be cleansed. Unfortunately, that is going to be a really painful “cure” for the American people.