It could have been a straight-up contest of ideas between Democratic incumbent Ric Bradshaw and Republican challenger Mike Gauger.

But dirt is what Palm Beach County’s police union wanted.

So, dirt is what voters are getting.

In trying to manipulate the Republican primary for sheriff, the local chapter of the Police Benevolent Association put out an attack ad featured on a since-deleted social media post. The ad publicized Gauger’s private military-related health information while ignoring state rules designed to keep law enforcement officers safe by not revealing identifying information, including birth dates. And it made campaign contributions to Gauger’s opponent in a poorly disguised effort to keep Gauger, Bradshaw’s best-financed challenger, from facing the sheriff in November.

You could understand why the union thinks knocking Gauger off the Aug. 20 primary ballot will lead to a slam dunk win for the sheriff in the general election. Four years ago, Bradshaw easily beat Gauger’s current GOP primary opponent, Lauro Diaz.

Four years ago, there’s no campaign record showing the county’s police union gave Diaz a dime.

This year, with a credible challenger to the sheriff, the union is suddenly very interested in Diaz’s political health. Palm Beach and Broward county police unions, as well as three police union political action committees, each donated $1,000 to Diaz. Miami-Dade County’s police union followed suit, bringing police union support for Diaz to $6,000.

If the local union had only sought to finance Gauger’s opponent, that would be sketchy politics, but still: just politics.

But the union went further. Its political action committee obtained and distributed a restricted military document with Gauger’s health information and used it in a video. The video claims the discharge paperwork, which is not a public record, showed Gauger had presented himself as a veteran when the document proved he had never served at all.

In fact, it showed the opposite. Gauger, who was drafted during the Vietnam War, briefly served and was dismissed with an honorable discharge based on a health condition. That makes him a vet, according to Veterans Administration rules.

So why is the union kneecapping Gauger? Try money.

Gauger believes deputies get paid too much, PBA president John Kazanjian told The Palm Beach Post.

Not our job to fact-check, added Bradshaw’s campaign spokesman in a sort-of effort to distance the sheriff from the smear.

But that comment about deputy pay drags the sheriff and his budget right into the middle of this ugly fray.

Burgeoning spending is Bradshaw’s most obvious political vulnerability and has been for years. And for years, he has repeatedly cited rising wages to justify budget hikes. That includes wages his office negotiated with the union.

The sheriff’s budget has shot up by 51% from $630.7 million in 2018 to a proposed $952.3 million for 2025. In the new budget, personnel costs grow by $64 million, and of that increase, $42 million stems from union-negotiated wages and undefined benefit policies.

At $102,252, the starting salary for a Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office sergeant is already the highest of any sheriff’s agency in the state, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The $133,212 starting salary for lieutenants is the second highest. Both are far above Broward and Miami-Dade wages.

And they are minimums.

The county foots the bill for this groaning board of a budget, but it has no real say in salary. A 2004 state law specifically limits Palm Beach County from cutting sheriff’s wages. That leaves it up to the sheriff’s office to hold the line.

True or not, the union clearly believes Gauger would not give them a good deal, just as it believes Bradshaw will continue to do so, even as local taxpayers will shoulder an estimated billion-dollar law enforcement budget by 2026.

And why wouldn’t the union believe that? Bradshaw announced his bid for reelection in the union offices.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board endorsement of Bradshaw in the Democratic primary came with requests: more budget transparency and more distance from the union. They are serious concerns and need to be addressed. Bradshaw is not a bad candidate, and supporters who have repeatedly returned him to office are confident he is a good sheriff.

It’s union mudslinging that threatens to make him look like a bad one.

Pat Beall is a columnist and editorial writer for the Sun Sentinel. Contact her at beall.news@gmail.com.

Norton, an IT specialist with the Broward County School District, allowed her transgender daughter to play on a high school volleyball team. Florida’s inappropriately named Fairness in Women’s Sports Act bans students born male from playing on girls’ sports teams.

The ban was touted as saving girls from being injured by hulking transgender girls mowing down teammates and taking home all the trophies. However, like so many of the laws spewing from Gov. Ron DeSantis’ legislature as he ramped up his presidential bid, the 2021 law was only minimally tethered to reality. Norton’s daughter is slightly built. She frequently sat out volleyball games.

Broward’s newly hired school superintendent recommended firing Norton, who was clearly aware of the law: She and her husband had filed suit to overturn it.

By a 5-4 vote, the school board voted to suspend her for 10 days, hoping it will put the months-long controversy behind them.

Maybe. But they got there ugly, starting with the accusation that started the ball rolling. The world is full of amazing coincidences, so I guess it’s just a big old spoonful of serendipity that the anonymous person triggering this investigation just happened to be blowing the whistle on the woman suing the state and school board. Then there is the disconnect between the board and state’s own choices and the flurry of law-is-the-law justifications. A few:

• “Norton improperly held herself out to be an LGBTQ advocate.” Just like the Broward County School Board did last August, when it passed not one, but three resolutions in support of the LGBTQ community, two years after the anti-transgender Fairness in Women’s Sports Act was signed into law.
• “Norton broke the rules.” In trying to determine whether firing Norton was justified, the board asked for a list of other suspensions involving school employees. Here’s some of what they found: fraud, three-day suspension; indecent conduct, 10-day suspension; inappropriate behavior with student, three-day suspension; altercation with student, five-day suspension; abuse, 10-day suspension. (I am not certain if there is a rule on matching discipline to severity of conduct, but if there is, when the board decided it would be fair to suspend Norton for the same amount of time as someone whose misconduct involved abuse, the school district shattered it.)
• “Norton bullied people.” Not at all like state Rep. Webster Barnaby, who in a committee hearing said transgender people were “mutants living among us,” intoning “[T]he Lord rebuke you Satan and all of your demons and all of your imps that come parade before us.”
• “Norton cost taxpayers $16,500.” That’s the fine levied against the teen’s school by the Florida High School Athletic Association because it did not comply with the law. Not to be confused with the $108 million in taxpayer money the Broward County School Board will have to cough up to charter schools because it did not comply with the law.
• “Norton failed to maintain honesty in professional dealings.” Just like the school district, which in 2022 “took extraordinary steps” to keep 50,000 people from learning about ransomware attacks that jeopardized personal information. (Or maybe Norton took a page from the Florida Dept. of Education, which all but shrieked that there were no book bans. There were. Or DeSantis, who said reports that a Roberto Clemente biography was banned was a joke. It wasn’t. The book had been warehoused, gathering dust as Duval County’s school district tried to comply with a DeSantis-championed law.)
• “Norton distorted facts.” Just like Florida lawyers in another trans case, who insisted that Florida’s ban on transgender medical care for adolescents brings the state in line with all of Europe. (Which Europe would that be? Although some countries are more restrictive than others, Norway, Sweden, France, and the U.K. are among those allowing medical treatment for gender dysphoria. And their restrictions are being accompanied by a commitment to expanding research to see where the science leads. Florida is the outlier.)

Now, Broward County is an outlier, too; the only Florida school district known to have punished a child as a result of the law. And they did punish her, however indirectly: She was a homecoming princess and president of her class. Outed as transgender, she now attends school virtually. No sports, no classmates, no prom, no cap-and-grown graduation.

As for her mother’s suspension, Jessica Norton did not harm a child, pointed out board member Sarah Leonardi.

No, she did not. The other adults did.

Pat Beall is a columnist and editorial writer for the Sun Sentinel. Contact her at pbeall1@gmail.com.

Just as South Florida heads into the teeth of the mean season, the good folks at the Heritage Foundation have a plan for dealing with rain, hail, waterspouts, searing heat, inland flooding and the wind monsters formerly known as hurricanes — just stop looking.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 weighs in at 880-plus pages, so it’s totally understandable if you missed the chapter on taking apart the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and either trashing its component bits — including the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center — or placing those bits in the loving hands of the private sector, aka “fat contracts for friends.”

I mean, you might have been busy bailing out from the rain that closed two emergency rooms in Broward this week. Or you might have been trying to get to one of them: Heat sent an estimated 31,011 Floridians to the hospital between 2018 and 2022. Maybe you were filling out disaster assistance forms from the no-name storm that flooded South Florida last month. Or scrambling to snare one of those rare-as-hen’s-teeth state grants to hurricane-harden your home in anticipation of next month.

Plus, to get to the war on weather (page 664), you must first wade through several hundred ideas on how to make our lives easier, such as making it easier to deny veterans’ disability benefits (pages 649-650); easier for farmers to go broke (page 297); easier for drug manufacturers to charge more to Medicare recipients (page 465); easier for kids to work dangerous jobs (page 595); easier to starve the poor (pages 299-300); easier for just about everyone to get information about your reproductive system (page 497).

But back to page 664. You know how everyone talks about the weather? There will be no more of that. Gov. Ron DeSantis only scrubbed the words climate change from every state document his minions can get their hands on. Amateur. Heritage shows him how the big boys do it.

The hurricane planes that fly meteorologists and researchers into the eye of hurricanes “like riding a roller coaster through a car wash” to gather more precise data? Besides saving big bucks on Dramamine, it’s hard to see the taxpayer benefit to keeping them out of the air. Never mind: Grounded and sent to other government agencies. (Page 677.)

Weather forecasts? The private market can take it over. Like AccuWeather. Except — spoiler alert — AccuWeather doesn’t want to be the next National Weather Service. Maybe because AccuWeather makes money using the free data it gets from the National Weather Service.

It’s all needed, say the Heritage authors, to counter the “climate alarmism” peddled by scientists alarmed about the climate.

For the record: We aren’t alarmed because someone in NOAA told us 2023 was the oceans’ hottest year.

We are alarmed because you can now poach eggs in South Beach surf.

Maybe because Project 2025 is less a blueprint for the next conservative president and more of a hard-right wrecking ball, some Washington folk are all “never-heard-of-it.” We’re looking at you, 140 former Trump employees. But the Heritage Foundation has a track record of results. Back in 1981, it drew up another ambitious plan for making our lives easier. The Reagan administration adopted 60% of it.

Even meteorologists would face an uncertain future, given that Project 2025 also calls for replacing tens of thousands of federal workers with political toadies beholden only to the White House. (Pages everywhere.) Maybe the new and unimproved NOAA won’t fire them. Since the goal is to commercialize forecasting, maybe NOAA will follow the lead of TV stations when a windstorm threatens: Hand them yellow raingear, industrial strength hairspray and an updated life insurance policy, then suggest a walk on the beach.

True, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. But when the storms of September come huffing and puffing and threatening to blow all our houses down, when those first hard drops of rain hit the roof and leaves are being flayed from the trees, we don’t need political appointees with fistfuls of black markers drawing wavy lines on whiteboards and telling us everything is going to be okey-dokey.

We don’t need NOAA dismantled. We need it buffed up: more meteorologists, more tech, more science. Fewer Sharpies, please. More truth.

Pat Beall is a columnist and editorial writer for the Sun Sentinel. Contact her at pbeall1@gmail.com.

Good news! Party poopers might be weeping and wailing and gnashing teeth over U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to toss out the classified documents case against the Master of Mar-A-Lago. Grammarians might bemoan a judicial ruling that turned “our nation’s secrets” into an oxymoron right alongside “jumbo shrimp,” “congressional intelligence” and “functioning Cybertrucks.”

Not me. Not all of us have second-bathroom space. And now that we are free to do with it whatever, however and whenever we want, I am happy to tell you there are many uses for NSA scrap paper!

You can make paper airplanes and throw them out of Air Force One!

You can grab a pot of paste and make your very own papier-mache Supreme Court! Optional: Toss out three of the justices who no one is listening to anyway. Or: Make another three papier-mache justices when no one is looking.

Craft a paper crown. Usually, art critics would not approve of painting something just so it would be all matchy-matchy with other shiny objets d’art laying around the house — chandeliers, a gilded toilet, airplanes, etc. But in this case, a bright, shiny gold is warranted. For an extra special finishing touch, stick six papier-mache Supreme Court justices on it. They won’t even know you have them where you want them. They haven’t figured it out so far.

You could grab some scissors and cut your secret memos into puzzle pieces. Send some of the pieces — but only some! — to BFFs like Victor, Vlad and Kim, forcing them to work together to solve it. Diplomacy! But slyly hold back the center piece. Maybe a few center pieces. Call it The Puzzle of Democracy.

Or slip a few papers into Hunter Biden’s briefcase. Feeling especially mischievous? Put the briefcase in Jim Jordan’s desk. Make an anonymous call to Merrick Garland. Or Maria Bartiromo. Or the guy next door with the Q-Anon flag and the YouTube channel. Stand back and watch the fun!

Of course, not every use has to be Etsy-worthy. There are bird cages to be lined and windows to be cleaned; political litmus tests to be administered and Rorschach test results that need to be hidden.

And since these are words we are dealing with, don’t neglect the opportunities for irony. For instance, super-white paper can contain trace amounts of highly toxic dioxins. So just tear up your own super-white, super-secret papers into teeny tiny little confetti-size pieces and sprinkle them over what is left of the EPA’s authority to regulate dioxins (and everything else). Pat your pocket-sized papier-mache justices on the back while you do so.

Also, paper is responsible for about 1% of greenhouse gas emissions. But that’s not nearly enough! Throw’em on the grill and smoke up a storm! Bonus: Incineration releases dioxins.

And you might very well want to burn them, and then bury their ashes, before anyone finds the political secret embedded in your cache of political secrets. Some paper is made with china clay, and even though it is little-c china and not big-C China, my experience has been that neither the next-door-neighbor YouTubers nor Jim Jordan are overly concerned with the subtleties of punctuation, much less geology. Not when a good old fashioned groundless conspiracy is being waved in front of them.

Plus, although china clay is mined all over the world, at least some of the china clay really is from clay in China, and how would you know which is which? Better to be safe.

But maybe set aside just one very special box of classified clips. May I suggest the ones that you have not already used as a soda coaster? Haul out a few Sharpies and get started on those thank-you notes to the many, many people who have made it possible to bring national secrets out of dark bathrooms all over American and put them proudly on display for friends, frenemies and, especially, gob-smacked foreign spies dazed by their good fortune.

Who also thank you.

Pat Beall is a columnist and editorial writer for the Sun Sentinel. Contact her at pbeall1@gmail.com.

And why shouldn’t its internationally cherished trophy be taken out for a quick dip in a salty ocean?

I confess I am baffled by the dentist-defying sport and even more baffled by how championship ice games wound up yards from sand so hot it glasses over in August.

So, I might have ignored the Florida Panthers beating the Edmonton Oilers 2-1 to clinch the Stanley Cup. But then they made history by taking the Cup into the Atlantic for a spritz, and the scolds came out.

People sniffed disapproval and then sniffed harder when teammates filled the Cup with beer and tipped it over the edge of a two-story balcony. “Nearly drowned a man!” shrieked one person on X.

Others of us see the sacrifice involved: Despite metal heated by the Florida sun, despite the weight of a fully-beered Stanley, and no doubt weakened by a previous evening spent in thoughtful post-game locker-room contemplation, players hefted and helpfully aimed their prize in the general direction of thirsty patrons.

Nattering nabobs of non-mainstream media might call it assault by beverage.

I call it fan service.

True, you don’t see Nobel Laureates skipping their gold medallions across the lake or arthouse directors chucking their little crystal Palme d’Ors at passing fans. No one is using their Masters jacket as a putting green. And it’s pretty safe to assume the Tour de France’s “King of the Mountain” polka-dotted jersey is stuck in the back of a closet and unlikely to come out to party, if only because: men and polka dots.

Further, no one really knows how all this would sit with the excruciatingly dignified Lord Frederick Arthur Stanley, 16th Earl of Derby, Governor General of Canada, Lord Mayor of Liverpool, Lieutenant-Colonel Commandant of the 1st Royal Lancashire Militia and father to a hockey-loving daughter who pushed him to drop $50 on a seven-inch silver trophy.

My position? If the NHL didn’t want Kentucky Derby winner Go to Gin nibbling oats from the Stanley Cup, maybe they should have thought twice before putting a bowl on top.

No, really, they should not have put a bowl on top.

New York Ranger Sylvain Lefebvre baptized his daughter in it — the first of several players to put the Stanley Cup to such use. Detroit Red Winger Tomas Holmstrom baptized his niece in it, then used it to serve potato dumplings. What’s fair for the goose, etc., so when fellow Winger Kris Draper posed his diaperless infant in it, the baby “baptized” the cup. “I still drank out of it that night, so no worries,” he said. No, Kris, no worries whatsoever.

Carolina Hurricanes Erik Cole served his children Applejacks from the Cup. New York islander Barry Trottier slept with it. New Jersey Devils Martin Brodeur ate popcorn out of it.

Detroit Red Wing Captain Steve Yzerman showered with it.

The Rangers burned the Madison Square Garden mortgage in it, leading to the Curse of 1940, leading to the Rangers waiting 54 years for another win.

Buddy the Labrador retriever snacked from the Cup (Anaheim Duck Sean O’Donnell); so did Hombre the German Shepherd (New York Islander Clark Gillies). “He’s a good dog,” explained Gillies.

Fellow Islander John Tonelli rented a stretch limo and took it to play golf. Vegas Golden Knight Phil Kessel took it to a golf course to use as a hot dog stand.

And yet.

When images of an ESPN producer jovially lifting the Stanley Cup while on set hit the internet in 2007, Canadians howled (albeit in that very Canadian-polite and nicely accented way) that the Cup was being disrespected.

This is the same Canada with the same Edmonton Oilers with the same Mark Messier who in 1987 celebrated their NHL championship by taking Lord Stanley’s finest to a strip club stage.

Indeed, in the early 1900s, it was one of Canada’s Montreal Wanderers, a bowling alley operator, who used the chalice to hold gum and cigars. In 1906, Wanderers left it at a photographer’s studio. The photographer’s mother planted geraniums in it. In 1962, an entire treeful of Toronto Maple Leafs mistook the yard-high, three-tiered, 34-pound, shiny silver and nickel alloy trophy for a stick of brown wood and tossed it on a bonfire.

And that, friends, is why we can’t let the Canadians have our nice things.

Pat Beall is a columnist and editorial writer for the Sun Sentinel. Contact her at pbeall1@gmail.com.

You do not ask her what kind of bra she was wearing. You do not ask her what kind of underwear she wore. You do not demand to know why she did not perfectly recollect details from a trauma two years earlier. You do not hint that she has a drug problem, or than she got body piercings illegally.

If you are a Palm Beach County prosecutor in the Jeffrey Epstein case in 2006, you do underline the section of state law defining whether a 14-year-old girl can legally consent to sex with a 50-something man who has coerced her into a small, closed room.

Or, you can just cut to the chase. She can’t.

If you are a grand juror listening to the girl, you do not ask, “Do you have any idea, deep down inside you, that what you did was wrong?” In other words, you do not ask the girl if she feels guilty about being assaulted.

But the juror asked, and the girl answered.

Yes, she said.

She did feel guilty for the harm Epstein did to her.

In a kinder, compassionate world, where people genuinely love and care for children, as opposed to a world where people simply talk about compassionately loving and caring for children, her response would make you weep.

But in the world of the Epstein grand jury, a prosecutor followed up the juror’s poisonous question with another.

Did the girl know she committed a crime when she accepted money after Epstein assaulted her? No, she hesitantly answered. Not then.

Plenty of people in that room that day had reason to be ashamed. The girl was not one of them.

Then-Palm Beach County State Attorney Barry Krischer so thoroughly botched the case against Epstein that it would take more than a decade before the veil was pulled back again on the victims, the island, the politicians, the prince and the socialite pimp.

Credit The Palm Beach Post’s years-long legal battle to unseal grand jury testimony for showing us how the victim became the accused. The documents were finally made public last week.

Maybe we should not be surprised to read behaviors that Palm Beach Circuit Judge Luis Delgado described as “grossly unacceptable to rape.” After all, decades of ink have been spilled, describing the singular perversions of Jeffrey Epstein.

But there’s more than one kind of obscenity in the world, and more than one kind of assault. There are the sex crimes committed by the Jeffrey Epsteins, the Jerry Sanduskys, the Father John Geoghans.

Then there’s the crime of what we do next.

Mostly, what we do is refuse to see. We’ve bought into the image of the pedophile monster. But child abusers are not monsters.

They are adults making a monstrous decision to wound children. As long as we insist on seeing a monster, though, we will never see the flesh-and-bone abuser standing in front of us, asking for our child’s hand. And as long as we do not see them, we cannot stop them.

Epstein is a case in point. Not an ogre hiding beneath a bridge, he was too model-pretty and too Palm Beach-rich to fit anyone’s idea of an unnatural horror. Accusatory eyes slid right off him and right onto his victims.

We endlessly make excuses for the famous, the attractive, the powerful, even when the evidence of their depravity is on full display. Consider: An unemployed 37-year-old science teacher repeatedly brings gifts to young boys. He has play dates with them. He invites them to sleep over, with him, in the same bed.

How long would it take for mothers to blow the whistle? For police to investigate? How long until adults molested by him as children were believed?

Now, how long would all that take if it wasn’t an unemployed teacher, but the king of pop music?

Child sex abusers may always be with us. As far back as the 11th century, Benedictine monk Peter Damian railed about priests having sex with adolescent boys.

The question isn’t what they will do. The question is whether we will know it when we see it — or whether, as in that grand jury room, we will make it worse.

Pat Beall is a columnist and editorial writer for the Sun Sentinel. Contact her at pbeall1@gmail.com.

I’m not the only one who’s not taken seriously because they hit the white hair mark. Age was already being weaponized before Thursday’s debate, but Joe Biden’s performance not only failed to defuse it, he accelerated it.

If the chorus of post-debate calls for Biden to step aside for a younger candidate don’t move him, then Florida seniors face a challenge of their own. How we think about our own age, and how many of us buy the idea of a one-size-fits-all expiration date, will follow us right into the voting booth, either as a factor in the presidential race or dozens of other races where candidates are older than 65. And what moves the needle in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, home to about one out of every four Floridians 65 and older, can move the needle for Florida.

We don’t think rationally about age in America. We don’t acknowledge how physiologically idiosyncratic getting older can be. We brush off science showing that changes in workplace productivity don’t equate to losses in productivity. We don’t confront “Doddering Dearie” stereotypes, the soft bigotry of our own low expectations for ourselves.

When Clint Eastwood chatted up an empty chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, the under-50 cognoscenti gave the incident a hushed-tone treatment typically reserved for advanced funeral planning. Two years later, Eastwood’s film direction was nominated for six Academy Awards — at age 85.

My own mother regularly cleaned up at Texas Hold ‘Em, was working her way through Harry Potter on a Kindle, and still found time to dissect the evening news — she liked ABC for the cute anchor — until her death. Age 98.

Even as we rave over 84-year-old Nancy Pelosi’s stiletto heels and 80-year-old Mick Jagger strutting across an Orlando stage, we’re drawn in by viral Twit-bits calling the old-guy-in-chief Captain Poopy Pants.

In other lying news, a doctored video made it look as if Biden had wandered off at a summit in Italy. He hadn’t. But the video fix was in.

Youth is not a guarantee that a politician will stay put. In 2015, the entire Florida House of Representatives, led by Speaker Steve Crisafulli, wandered off and went home three days early, peeved at the Senate. Age at walkout: 44.

Crisafulli might have been following the example of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who in 2009 hopped off the grid and said he was going to hike the Appalachian Trail. Maybe he forgot he was in Buenos Aires with his mistress. Directional confusion and elopement from safe premises. Age 49.

Many of us may have whizzed past our sell-by date without noticing. Some studies suggest mental acuity peaks at 30, and it’s all downhill from there.

This may help explain U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s argument that the U.S. should not provide humanitarian aid to women and children in Afghanistan because it’s not in the Constitution. Age 33. (That was fast!)

On the other hand, there’s Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who seemed perfectly compos mentis in 2010, when he said of the federal Medicare fraud case leading to $1.7 billion in fines and 14 criminal counts against his hospital company: “There’s no question that mistakes were made, and as CEO, I have to accept responsibility.”

But in Manhattan last month, at Donald Trump’s trial, Scott garbled his words, saying politically persecuted when he really meant to say “fairly prosecuted.” Gray-cell word salad. Age 71. Tsk tsk.

As for old-people-run-the world handwringing, Congress is less a gerontocracy than a late middle-age mosh pit. The average age in the 118th Congress is 58, and it’s falling.

Sure, you’ve got your 80-somethings raging against the machine. Bernie is still burnin’ at 82. You’ve also got bright-eyed whippersnappers like Rep. Matt Gaetz, whose 42-year-old brain cells labored mightily and came up with a plan for continued bombing of an endangered whale’s Gulf of Mexico habitat; “one of the most exquisite places in the world for weapons testing,” he reportedly told a congressional committee.

His father, former Florida Senate President Don Gaetz, has made enough millions and is now making a bid for his old state Senate seat. Age 76. Why not?

In Colonial America, when life expectancy topped out at 38, 71-year-old Thomas Jefferson moaned to his best frenemy John Adams that sadly, their fate was now aches and pains: “Here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way.” Jefferson then trotted off to build the University of Virginia.

Not to be outdone, George Washington grabbed his wooden teeth and came out of post-presidential retirement to rejoin the Army and go to war. At age 66.

The father of our country had been complaining about being old since he was in his 50’s.

Pat Beall is a columnist and editorial writer for the Sun Sentinel. Contact her at pbeall1@gmail.com.

They are coming for our birth control. And our family’s IVF dreams. And sex in general.

A not insignificant number won’t be happy till they roll the whole kit and caboodle back to 1950 and June Cleaver vacuuming in her heels and pearls.

How do we know this? Because every time they open their mouth, they tell us. Then they frantically try to un-tell us.

This month’s political whiplash poster child is our very own senator, Rick Scott. A warm and fuzzy political ad for Scott dropped on Twitter last week declaring he will always, always, protect IVF.

Always.

Twenty-four hours earlier, he voted against protecting IVF.

He’s not the only one switching stories on how women’s reproduction should be controlled.

“There is no threat to contraception nationally,” Sen. Marco Rubio told the Washington Post. “It’s all made up stuff.’”

That was May 23.

Two weeks later, he voted against a bill creating a federal right to access contraception.

“It’s silly to think contraceptives are at risk,” Roger Severino of the Heritage Foundation chided the Washington Post, shortly after the Heritage X account featured a call for conservatives to “lead the way in … ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills.”

Yes. Getting rid of recreational sex is now an emerging political platform. Be sure and tell that to your fiancée when he explains he’s voting based purely on tax bracket considerations.

Nor is Rubio finished with the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone, despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that a motley crew who tried to get it banned had no legal standing to sue. To be more precise, one-legged flamingoes had more standing than plaintiffs who never prescribed mifepristone and never treated anyone because of mifepristone complications.

But why interrupt a vacationing Clarence Thomas when you can just end-run the court and go to the EPA?

Rubio and Palm Harbor congressman Gus Bilirakis late last month co-authored a letter to the agency warning that mifepristone is an eco-hazard, flooding the sewer systems of America and threatening the health of humans as well as — dear readers, I do not make these things up — fish and critters.

Just for good measure, they casually dropped in the jump-scare phrase “drinking water.”

(Petty of me to complain, but: Already, talking to people making decisions about people’s bodies when they don’t understand how those people’s bodies work forces us into discussions of reproductive biology at the headache-inducing cellular level. Do we really have to start arguing over how city sanitation systems work, too?)

It takes nothing from the deeply held convictions of millions opposed to abortion to acknowledge a plan previously hinted at but now shouted: For some number of opponents, abortion is just the leading edge of an agenda that a few years ago would have been designated tin-hat fringe.

Take IUDs and emergency contraception. They don’t end pregnancies. They prevent them. Now, there’s a move to bend science and redefine pregnancy so that both forms of birth control can be categorized as abortion-inducing and subject to possible bans. As for the pill, choosing to take it isn’t an adult woman’s considered decision about a drug on the market for half a century; no, it reflects “birth control pharmaceutical propaganda” persuading clueless, unsuspecting women everywhere to “dose themselves with cancer-causing hormones.”

Birth control is about more than sex. It’s about money and jobs. Pregnancy may be welcomed and wonderful, but childbirth is also the great disruptor. A woman who cannot reliably control her reproduction risks multiple unplanned pregnancies, and unplanned pregnancies can render an employed woman undependable, if not unemployable. An unemployable woman cannot help a loving husband put food on the table for those children. And she cannot leave an abusive one.

This is not the speculative stuff of red gowns and dystopian fiction.

It was the world of the 1960s and early 1970s, before the pill was approved and abortion was legalized. It was the world where women were routinely asked in job interviews whether they were married, or if they had children, or if they planned to have children. That was not polite chatter. It was screening.

Never mind all that. Even Elon Musk has chimed in, telling his millions of followers, not all of them Russian bots, that the pill makes women fat and sad.

So does snacking obsessively while pondering how an unmarried father of 10 hawking rusty trucks and exploding cars gets to lecture women on birth control. But then, bad mysteries make me hungry.

Pat Beall is a columnist and editorial writer for the Sun Sentinel. Write her at pbeall1@gmail.com.

Citing Google’s hate speech policy, the tech platform briefly booted the non-university with the gown and mortarboard name from its Play Store.

Florida’s Department of Education had already invited it into our elementary schools.

After a closer review, Google returned PragerU to the app marketplace.

Florida left it in our classrooms.

PragerU is not a school. There are no degrees. There are instead short, snappy videos on hot-button topics, the multimillion-dollar brainchild of talk show host Dennis Prager and his producer.

Nor is PragerU committed to fact-based academics. Rather, it is committed to interpreting facts in the same way certain Supreme Court justices are committed to recent re-readings of the Constitution: hard right and predictably partisan.

But reality revision is only part of the problem. From the anti-Muslim screed that alarmed Google’s hate speech-seeking detectors to the kid curriculum approved for Florida students, PragerU videos are suffused with invitations to rage.

The wonder is that they made it into classrooms at all.

After all, Gov. Ron DeSantis declared a bold plan for state education last March: School children would no longer be indoctrinated.

We’re indoctrinating school children, Dennis Prager cheerfully announced three months later.

The same month, Florida’s Department of Education green-lit PragerU curriculum for even the very youngest kindergarten students.

Florida was the first — and for a time, the only — state to do so.

To the credit of educators statewide, a 2023 survey by WPTV found few districts approved using PragerU. PragerU insists teachers don’t need approval from their bosses.

No one seems to be talking about getting approval from parents.

Objections have focused on video and cartoon content that is more truth-adjacent than true. Less obvious is the trademark PragerU anger — sowed, funneled or redirected — that runs through them.

Take the animated tale of a young Polish girl who questions climate change. Ania’s Energy Crisis doesn’t just parrot decades-old denial tropes.

No: Her teachers frown. Her friends shun her. Her blog readers post mean things.

Ania is comforted by her grandfather, who compares her decision to fight for non-science to those who bravely fought in World War II.

This is not a lesson about science. It’s not even a blueprint for climate denial, because Ania is not merely a skeptic. She is persecuted. She is righteous. She stands with warriors.

Go get ‘em, little Ania.

Injecting battle imagery is likely a deliberate choice, given the description of climate science by PragerU CEO Marissa Streit on X: “Hysterical anti-human climate change narrative.”

At Prager, this confluence of rage and reality distortion starts at the very top and trickles down.

“If you see a noose on a college dorm of a Black student, the odds are overwhelming that the noose was put there by a Black student,” Dennis Prager said in 2020. If there’s an n-word graffitied on a college dorm, a Black student probably did that too, he added: “We’re filled with race hoaxes.”

Count among them the PragerU animation featuring Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Yes, slavery was bad, says a cartoon Douglass.

But what were the founding fathers to do, he asks. In ignoring slavery for a while, they could focus on establishing America, creating “something great.”

It seems unlikely that Douglass — whose mother was separated from him in infancy, who at age 6 slept on the cold floor of a hovel while putting his body in a sack and his feet in warm ashes because he had no blanket and owned no pants, who was sent to a man who beat him so badly and so often that his wounds had no time to heal before he was beaten again, and who wrote of his escape that, “I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions” — was so sanguine about slavery.

But what do I know?

Certainly, more than PragerU wants to teach our children.

More than the little Anias of the world, who, before armoring up and heading off to righteously reeducate, might benefit from knowing that PragerU videos are made possible in part by millions of dollars from frack-happy climate crisis deniers.

That would be a pretty big lesson for Ania. But not, perhaps, the kind of lesson that Tallahassee — and PragerU — have in mind for our children.

Pat Beall is a columnist and editorial writer for the Sun Sentinel. Write her at pbeall1@gmail.com.

When ex-Palm Beach County Sheriff’s deputy turned Russian tool John Mark Dougan was still whetting his teeth on local cyber lies, Mike Gauger was his favorite target.

And Gauger’s wife.

And Gauger’s child.

It takes a cast iron stomach to read the vitriol leveled at the former PBSO deputy chief and his family on smear sites linked to Dougan.

Turns out, though, the chaos Dougan sowed in Palm Beach County was just a warm-up for the Kremlin.

Working from a report by NewsGuard, The New York Times last week dived into Dougan’s unlikely rise from vicious local cyberstalker to Vladimir Putin’s right-hand disinformation man.

NewsGuard found 167 fake “independent news” websites believed linked to Dougan, who fled to Moscow in 2016 one step ahead of the feds.

His web of fake websites have drawn 37 million views.

Echoes of their published lies are everywhere. The lie that Russia invaded Ukraine to destroy secret U.S. biolabs? Repeated by Tucker Carlson. The lie that Ukraine’s president bought yachts? Heard from U.S. Sen. J. D. Vance.

Dougan’s response? Not me. Not my sites.

He is too modest by half. In addition to NewsGuard, Clemson University researchers meticulously backtracked IP addresses; so did sleuths at Recorded Future, a threat intelligence company.

The broad conclusion was not just that Dougan was at the nexus of the sites; it was that the sites were a nexus of Kremlin disinformation.

Putin isn’t paying me, Dougan protested.

That doesn’t mean he isn’t providing value.

Dougan has parroted the anti-American line on Russian TV. He published prepackaged Russian anti-Ukraine propaganda on YouTube and is a repeat panelist on an anti-Ukraine Russian tribunal.

If the FBI paid attention, they might have noted Dougan’s 2013 trips from Palm Beach County to Russia, where he said he scored an unlikely sit-down with high-level Russian apparatchik Pavel Borodin.

They might have wondered how an ex-sheriff’s deputy with a small tech business came to be chatting up projects with the man known as Putin’s mentor.

The FBI, though, had shrugged off Dougan.

No one knew that better than Gauger, the former PBSO deputy chief.

Cyber assaults targeting Gauger and his family continued years after Dougan quit the force in 2009. Lewd photoshopped pictures of his wife were spread online. His child was targeted.

Federal cyberstalking can carry a prison sentence. But Gauger had made the law enforcement rounds, including the FBI, and no one seemed interested. He sued for libel. It went nowhere.

Then, in 2016, the home addresses of thousands of Florida prosecutors, law enforcement agencies and judges were published on a Dougan website.

The FBI raided his Palm Beach Gardens home.

Dougan hopped on a commercial jet, fled to Russia, and was promptly granted asylum.

Even in Moscow, though, he continued his harassment campaigns. In 2017, he scored a hit.

Gauger was on a cruise with his wife that year when his cell phone started blowing up. A faked PBSO deputy’s report had metastasized into a viral media storm. It claimed PBSO had found Gauger was a white supremacist, posting on a neo-Nazi website that he wanted to rape and kill a black man or a Jew.

Bloggers ran with the phony story. Comedian D.L. Hughley posted it on social media. So did Raw Story, with its legions of social media followers.

Everywhere, people believed it, said Gauger. “A girl I went to high school with sends me a message, ‘Mike, is any of this true?’”

The original “story” was published on the website DC Weekly. Dougan denied involvement.

According to Clemson researchers, DC Weekly went dormant after 2017 only to reemerge in 2021. It was tied to Dougan, researchers wrote, and with “likely links to the Russian government.”

Just as Dougan denied having anything to do with lies aimed at Gauger, he has denied being Moscow’s most prolific propaganda troll.

He is now a Russian citizen. He says he voted for Putin.

It’s doubtful that he’ll be back soon. He’s facing an arrest warrant on 21 felony charges of extortion and wiretapping.

But Palm Beach County is still on his mind. Three weeks ago, Gauger says, he got a call.

It was his old tormentor, Dougan.

Dougan apologized, he said, and told him his true target had always been Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw.

And then, said Gauger, Dougan made him an offer.

He had heard Gauger was running for sheriff. If he happened to have any dirt on Bradshaw, he should feel free to pass it along.

Dougan said he might be able to help.

Pat Beall’s column appears every Saturday in the Sun Sentinel. Write to Pat at pbeall1@gmail.com.