Above and below, July 13, 2010 photo by me, looking south at the Broward County Schools HQ, 600 S.E. Third Avenue, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
In 2016, quite out-of-the-blue, I received an interesting Tweet from someone I'd never met or ever heard of before, Angela Greben, a San Jose, California resident. Among other things, Angela really hates government agencies and officials who seem to not think twice about violating norms (or even laws) about public records and transparency and what the public is entitled to expect in the way of access to public information.
Her tweet caused quite a ripple after I wrote about it and what I thought it represented.
Though I've never spoken about it before, despite all the dozens of prior blog posts I'd written here about the feckless School Board, her tweet, and actually seeing that list of Blocked people, with my name on top of it, caused me to receive lots of email from concerned people all over Broward County, South Florida and points north and west whom I'd never heard from before.
People who shared my own misgivings about the bad conduct of the scandal-plagued and mis-behaving Broward County School Board.
That is to say, the Broward School Board as a collective entity, as well as it ragtag collection of constituent members and superintendents, and their army of supporters and flacks.
For you newcomers, take a look at this post from earlier in the year:
Culture of Corruption & Incompetency by Feckless Broward School Board, General Counsel Barbara J. Myrick & Supt. Robert Runcie in a Nutshell.
re The special Grand Jury impaneled by the Florida Supreme Court via Gov. Ron DeSantis investigating feckless Broward County Schools & its School Board:
Broward education activists & taxpayers want you to make sure that Broward Schools General Counsel Barbara J. Myrick is one of first persons grilled.
She has a LOT to publicly account for, as does nearly every School Board member
Yes, the whole cast of charcters at Broward Schools have been a frequent and popular target of my fact-filled blog posts and fact-based Twitter barbs ever since I started the blog twelve years ago, and then, finally got a Twitter acount under the nom-de-guerre @hbbtruth.
Yes, as in Hallandale Beach Blog + Truth, because that's what this blog is all about in the end.
Revealing the truth so that the public knows what is reality and what is, you know, Fake News.
To my own eternal regret and embarrassment, I was rather late to the Twitter party, especially given my ENFP personality, who I am in the scheme of things locally in this part of southeast Broward and the sheer volume of history I know as well as the number of knowledgeable and influential people I know who know even more than I do, including about the Broward School system's history, track record, and its various roster of players over the years, who've shared what they know with me.
People like Charlotte Greenbarg, for instance.
"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."
- Winston Churchill
So, as to that part above about having "enemies"... For those of you who are newcomers to the blog, I've been writing fact-filled, analytical blog posts about the serial corruption, incompetency and fecklessness by the Broward School Board on a whole array of issues for the past twelve years.
And, I've also written about them with regularity as well on my popular South Florida Twitter handle, @hbbtruth, since October of 2013, often buttressing some other person's good point with facts, or, necessarily throwing some cold water on someone via cold hard facts who wants us to believe something that can't be believed by anyone who knows anything about common sense or human behavior.
Trust me, there's a good reason that so many activists, personalities, elected officials and members of the South Florida or Florida press corps that you know and trust are Following me on Twitter and reading my latest post on this blog, which can net anywhere between 15,000 and 90,000 page views a month, depending upon the subjects du jour and the time of year, with, not surprisingly, "the season," October thru April being highest readership numbers for the blog.
That means not just accepting whole what is written in South Florida newspapers or on websites or seen on TV, but of my actually going to meetings all over Broward County -and especially in Hollywood and Hallandale Beach- and meeting other concerned and curious Broward citizens and taxpayers who wonder about the same things I do: ethics, accountability, public oversight, conflicts-of-interest and power plays by certain parties and groups within the Broward education Establishment and the people who support it in the Broward business community, who make lots of money on the school system as contractors and vendors for projects needed and wasteful.
So, I have seen first-hand the incriminating reports and the damning photos and the files that have been so much in the news since 2007 surrounding the culture of corruption.
As you might imagine, that sort of consistent public questioning of elected officials and administrators and a willingness to publicly challenge people personally to substantiate and back up what they say leads to lots of things.
On the one hand, it means that many people throughout Broward who make education one of their chief concerns -regular citizens, public officials as well as many local print/TV reporters and columnists- know from personal experience that when I say something, that I not only know of what I speak, but can also personally produce the incriminating evidence, or, know the very people who can produce it so that the public finds out the truth.
That sort of effort over a dozen years also creates all sort of friction with people who are supposed to be working FOR the public, including numerous past and current elected Broward School Board members, administrators and their staffs, who do NOT like seeing the truth being publicly discussed in a logical and reasonable way.
And even worse, discussed in print where anyone can see the facts and not have to accept their own particular spin on things.
So that kind of effort is why I was on the Top Ten list of people whom the Broward School system has been BLOCKING on Twitter since 2016, as the Angela Greben tweet above makes clear.
Yes, I wear they're BLOCKING of me like a gold medal, and proudly so.
Yesterday we all learned that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit had finally ruled in a case that has been featured dozens of times in U.S. news media over the past few years, issuing a unanimous opinion that President Trump has been violating the U.S. Constitution by blocking Twitter users who criticize or mock him.
Plaintiffs Buckwalter, Cohen, Figueroa, Gu, Neely, Papp, and Pappas (“Individual Plaintiffs”) are social media users who were blocked from accessing and interacting with the Twitter account of President Donald J. Trump because they expressed views he disliked. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University is an organization alleging a right to hear the speech that the Individual Plaintiffs would have expressed had they not been blocked. The Plaintiffs sued President Trump along with certain White House officials, contending that the blocking violated the First Amendment. The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Buchwald, J.) found that the “interactive space” in the account is a public forum and that the exclusion from that space was unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. We agree, and, accordingly, we affirm the judgment of the District Court.
that he engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination by utilizing Twitter’s “blocking” function to limit certain users’ access to his social media account, which is otherwise open to the public at large, because he disagrees with their speech. We hold that he engaged in such discrimination and, consequently, affirm the judgment below
The ruling leaves open lots of other interesting questions, like whether this will also apply to other federal, state and local elected officials, governments or agencies?
Read the court's opinion for yourself:
So in thinking about all of this yesterday, I knew that someone needed to ask a reasonable question to someone at the Broward School Board about its past history of Blocking concerned Residents like me on Twitter, given that South Florida's news media has not exactly jumped on this sort of story to the extent that I and many other civic activists believe they should have.
So, I thought of whom the most reasonable person was on the School Board whom I could ask.
That was an easy call.
It certainly isn't the feckless, foul-mouthed and Runcie-supporter who represents Hollywood and Hallandale Beach, Ann Murray, long a target of public criticism here on my blog and on my Twitter handle DOZENS of times when she has repeatedly and publicly engaged in misdirection and misrepresented both herself and her long track record of inaction, inadequacy and logrolling.
Because of the demographics of this part of Broward, our area should have an outstanding person on the School Board representing us. Someone who is known for their savviness, public demeanor, scrupulous ethics, their reliable, hardworking nature, and their willingness to admit when they are wrong and adjust their thinking to new facts and new realities.
None of which are qualities that have ever been associated with Ann Murray.
We could do SO MUCH better than Ann Murray, who was narrowly re-elected last November.
Given what I wrote about her last Friday on the blog and had earlier tweeted about her, it clearly wasn't going to be Dr. Roslind Osgood, now was it?
Mystery solved at Broward School Board! The Doctor did it! New York Times revealed that Broward County School Board member Rosalind Osgood used her African-American college sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, as a conduit to mobilize supporters of Supt. Robert W. Runcie at BCSB meetings earlier this year debating Runcie's future
In the end, I decided I'd use Twitter to ask School Board member Lori Alhadeff, someone who actually led the charge in March to make Supt. Runcie publicly accountable, to his one of his bosses, even though many of the School Board members defer to him so much on policy issues and decisions at meetings that you can well be forgiven for thinking that they work for him, not the other way around.
But not her.
What Lori Alhdaeff wants doesn't seem like too much to ask for: she wants the truth, positive results and to end the reign of the faceless School bureaucrats who seemingly can never be held to account publicly, no matter how bad things get and have already gotten.
That's something and someone worth supporting, especially under the horrific and unique circumstances that led her to running for the School Board last year.
Her pain is real and omnipresent.
I'll keep you advised on what I hear about this, since we all know that unless they are pushed or shoved, there are far too many members of the South Florida press corps who simply are NOT going to see this issue for what it truly is.
A sign that for many people in government in South Florida, i.e the Broward School Board and the Supt. Runcie, there are rules for some people and special rules for special people.
And they think they are special people.
No, the law has to apply to everyone if it is going to be both respected and followed.
No special rules for special people.
Period.
