Bohemian South

Four days have passed since President Barack Obama took enough of the electoral college to secure a second term and Florida has still not quite counted 100 percent of its ballots. But with the last absentee votes from overseas trickling in and precincts firming up, Florida’s Secretary of State today finally announced Obama would walk away with its 29 electoral votes. President Obama took the state by a paper-thin margin over challenger Mitt Romney at 50 percent to 49.1, or roughly 74,000 votes — barely over the half a percent margin that would have mandated a recount.

Finally! But a great result, anyway. Thank you to the good voters of Florida.

Zane Tankel, the CEO of Applebee’s New York Franchise, Apple-Metro, is so dedicated to not spending money on his employees that he’s refusing to hire anyone new. Why? Because he might have to provide them health care. Under the Affordable Care Act, a business of 50 people or more must provide a health care option for its employees by 2014. The 40 Applebee’s restaurants in New York employ hundreds of people, and Tankel believes providing them with health insurance plans will be too costly. In an appearance on Fox Business News, the CEO said he won’t be able to hire new people because of the law, and even floated the idea of layoffs.

In case you’re tempted to eat at an Applebee’s soon, you might want to consider a different restaurant that cares more about its employees and is a better corporate citizen. Olive Garden and Red Lobster were already on my personal boycott list. Now, Applebee’s is on the list, too. The good news? I’ll probably be eating healthier by avoiding these places.

The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it would take a fresh look at the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the signature legacies of the civil rights movement.

Sorry to say this, but as a Southerner from a family who has lived in this region for generations, I do not believe the time has come for lifting Voting Rights Act requirements. And, if those requirements are to be lifted any time soon, Alabama — where this challenge began — is not the place to start.

Florida residents have expressed their vitriol with the state’s troublesome elections process in waves in recent days, by firing off thousands of angry emails to Gov. Rick Scott. From all over the state, Floridians have bombarded the governor’s email address with their voting horror stories, and their embarrassment that Florida was still counting votes long after Pres. Barack Obama was declared the winner of Tuesday’s election.

The messages—and the national ridicule—have not been reflected in Scott’s public statements. He maintains that Florida “did the right thing.” Scott did say he would talk to his Sec. of State, Ken Detzner about possible fixes.

Nigeria is “at war” with Islamist sect Boko Haram and should not negotiate with its leaders who are “mass murderers”, Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka said on Friday.

President Goodluck Jonathan said earlier this year his government was open to dialogue with the sect, whose insurgency has killed an estimated 2,800 people since 2009. The sect is styled on the Afghan Taliban and while it usually targets security and government officials, it has also struck churches, mosques and universities, becoming the biggest security threat in Africa’s top oil producer.

“Don’t talk to mass murderers. You are not obliged to talk to those who made the killing of innocent people their philosophy,” Soyinka told reporters at a conference in Lagos. “This is a security issue. It becomes a question of who goes down: is it the community? Is it society? Is it the nation? Or is it a bunch of killers who are totally beyond control?”

Soyinka, 78, who sports a distinctive white Afro hairstyle, is a playwright and one of Africa’s leading intellectuals. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986.

Although I should know more about this situation, I can’t say that I do. I did meet Wole Soyinka while he was teaching at Emory University, though, and I have enormous respect for his opinions.

A flurry of racist tweets that followed President Barack Obama’s re-election came primarily from southern states, according to a map that geographically pinpointed the point of origin of the hate speech. Tweets calling the president a “monkey” or using racial epithets prompted a group of geography experts to try and break down whether the hateful language was more prevalent in some areas of the country than others. As it turns out, it was. …

Mississippi and Alabama had the highest ratio of racist tweets. They were followed by Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, forming a “fairly distinctive cluster in the southeast” of online hate speech, the research finds.

Southerners who behave like this shame themselves and disgrace their home region.

By any fair measure, the voting fiasco in Florida this year was a national embarrassment, but it was also the result of a deliberate plan — Gov. Rick Scott (R) and other Republican policymakers made it more difficult to vote in order to help their party. (It didn’t work; Democrats had a very good year in the Sunshine State.)

But now that the election is over, can Scott offer a defense of this fiasco? As he made clear yesterday, the far-right governor doesn’t think anything went wrong.

Election officials are defending their decision to allow music star Usher to bypass long lines and cast his ballot, infuriating voters who had to wait on Election Day. Fulton County, Georgia, election officials tell WSB-TV that Usher Raymond IV was escorted to the front of the line to minimize distractions at his Roswell, Georgia, polling place.

With the 2012 election not far away in the rear-view mirror, Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., is already looking forward to what he believes will be the next “premier race in the country”: Ashley Judd versus Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

“If you had an Ashley Judd-McConnell race, I think it would be as high-profile a race as Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown,” Yarmuth told the Louisville Courier-Journal, predicting campaign money for the actress and Kentucky native would “pour in as soon as she entered the race.”

Ashley Judd would be a formidable candidate against Mitch McConnell, who remains one of the greatest obstacles to progress in America.

A man claiming to be a Georgia small business owner said he fired some employees and cut hours for others because of President Barack Obama’s reelection. The man identified himself as Stu, without giving a last name, and said he owns a small aviation services company. He told C-SPAN’s Washington Journal that he “simply can’t afford” to run his business if he has to comply with the the Affordable Care Act. “Yesterday I called all my part-time employees in and said because Obama won I was cutting their hours from 30 to 25 a week so i would not fall under the Obamacare mandate,” Stu, who said he is from Williamson, Ga., told C-SPAN. Under the Affordable Health Care Act, businesses with more than 50 workers are required to provide health care coverage for full-time employees or those working more than 30 hours per week. Darden Restaurants, the parent company of Red Lobster and The Olive Garden, announced in October that it would downgrade workers to part-time status to limit costs from Obamacare. “I had to lay two full-timers off to get under the 50-person cap,” Stu told C-SPAN. “I tried to make sure that the people I had to lay off voted for Obama.”

“Stu,” who is so cowardly that he won’t give his last name, clearly has an ax to grind. And by firing Obama supporters he appears to be violating federal law. Any business that is trying to avoid providing health care is not a good corporate citizen. Red Lobster and Olive Garden appear to be in that category and until they reverse this policy, let’s stop eating at them (if we were eating at them anyway). My boycott has begun.