Sea turtle nest totals as of June 19…

The excruciating intractable pain of watching the Longboat Key Club ordinance go through the sausage grinder of town staff, attorneys in triplicate and the commission makes one question the metaphorical cleanliness of the procession underway in the Temple Beth Israel.

For a time, it might have appeared to some that Obama-ism had come to Longboat Key, with top-down decision making in the hands of a powerful few: hired bureaucrats whose subjective opinions and personal whims counted for everything while the popular will meant nothing and some of the people’s elected representatives (or non-representatives) bent like slender palms in a hurricane.

If you believe in Darwin, as I do, then you are persuaded that man has evolved onto the highest step in the animal kingdom, thanks largely to his magnificent brain and to oppositional thumbs.

Jonah Goldberg summed up the problem with the current debate on energy policy with one marvelous paragraph: “For years, environmentalists have been selling snake oil about energy policy, claiming that we can give up on nasty but affordable carbon-based energy such as coal, oil and gas and embrace wind, solar and geothermal (but not nuclear) at little to no cost. In fact, if you listen to people such as the New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, switching to solar panels and wind farms will make us richer and more competitive, if not cause unicorns to poop ‘green jobs’ and rainbows as far as the eye can see.”

For the past few years, it has appeared to outside observers that Longboat commissioners are so concerned with being liked that they do back flips to avoid up and down votes. I know I write too much about the old days, but you never caught Hart Wurzberg, Kit Fernald or Carleton Stewart trying to make nice with anyone sitting in front of them.

At first glance, forming a committee of “resident experts” to review the town’s operations seems like an outstanding idea. How can anyone disparage a review that “is intended to examine how the town is organized to carry out its many services and functions and to provide observation on how they might be more efficiently and effectively performed?”

The outcome is still in doubt. There are many questions to answer, and I don’t think anybody can predict what the outcome will be. It is still possible for the Key Club to attain all that they originally asked for or even possible that they will withdraw their project completely.

Meet my good friend and companion, Maid Phoebe of Longboat, a.k.a. Phoebe, an AKC registered Tri-Color Springer Spaniel just three years of age.

There have been more than 100 U.S. Opens…