Showing posts with label Alcee Hastings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alcee Hastings. Show all posts

Sunday, June 16, 2013

More bad news about Team Rubio: Contempt for Floridians 24/7! Not that you'll hear about this from Miami's sleepwalking press corps but... Rich Lowry tweets what Ryan Lizza's new New Yorker piece re immigration reform reveals about Marco Rubio's staff, and Politico adds fuel to the fire: "Marco Rubio's office shows their contempt for American workers" (More interested in legalizing illegal aliens than plight of average Floridians.) And then some!;






















More of the inherent weaknesses of Team Marco are being revealed every day.
That is, IF you are paying attention. (Like me.)

Sounds to me like the anonymous Rubio staffer quoted here,
http://www.politico.com/playbook/0613/playbook10932.html?hp=l6
is talking about Overtown, Liberty City, Opa-Locka and Carol City and Miami Gardens and large swaths of Fort Lauderdale to me.
Do Reps. Frederica Wilson and Alcee Hastings agree with this assessment of their constituents?

Too bad for this country and this state that so many Florida-based reporters and columnists are in-the-bag for Rubio, even those who disagree with him philosophically or politically. 
They continually pull their punches and don't challenge him enough -just like they pull their punches for almost everyone else, too.
That used to be called gutless, but now called "new normal" in American journalism.

As many of you regular readers of the blog may recall, while I lived and worked in Washington for 15 years, I always thought that Tim Russert was very over-rated and very fortunate to be a top dog in an era where there were so many no-talent journalists in the Washington Beltway who were more publicist than journalist, people who carried water for policies, not honestly examine them.

Still, despite my feelings about him, I'm 100% certain that the late host of NBC News 'Meet the Press" would've absolutely humbled Marco Rubio and brought him down a few pegs the past few weeks as the immigration debate has once again become one of the main issues in D.C. now that the Beltway media have decided amongst themselves that the the Benghazi and IRS scandals don't really matter since they would require lots of legwork during the hot D.C. summer.  

I think Russert would've positively undressed Rubio like a storefront mannequin by running one of those incisive video sequences he was so noted for that would show Rubio's recent penchant for flip-flopping in ways that would be hard to get out of your head.
He'd then come back from the videos with a LIVE interview and ask, "When will you be changing your mind again? And will you be just as certain then as you were this week and last month that you were right, right before you changed your mind?"

It's the bell that isn't ringing, that punch that nobody in DC seems interested or willing to deliver to Rubio's glass jaw, which is absolutely frustrating the hell out of me, especially given Rubio's very pious comments about his role and his comments about how necessary it is that all of the 11 million illegals get to stay.
Where's the proof that they should ALL stay, especially the ones that aren't interested in becoming citizens? 
Shouldn't we able to make some distinctions? 

Like the ones that Mickey Kaus talked about?
Serial drunk drivers!




http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/13/the-secret-dui-factor/

So why is Rubio so mum about other supporters of S.744 saying they think requiring people to be able to speak and understand basic English before becoming a U.S. citizen, as he would require, is a bridge too far?
Nobody even asks him!
What kind of people think THAT common sense requirement is unreasonable?

Since you asked, the very people and groups who are constantly emailing the Miami Herald, Tampa Bay Times and the Orlando Sentinel and being quoted there, which are then picked-up and run on TV station websites.

Still, say what you will about how contemptuous Rubio's staff may be, they can't be worse than the many unprofessional female staffers Connie Mack III had for years while he was Florida's junior senator, who would order beauty and health supplies for themselves over the main telephone in the front reception room while you waited to see someone.
Retin A anyone?


Sunday, December 2, 2012

Fact-checking the Miami Herald's local coverage of the "fiscal cliff" budget issue shows their obliviousness; Charles Krauthammer ponders "Cliff-jumping with Barack"; I suggest everyone check their ropes now!


Louisthx YouTube Channel video: Countdown clock for an NBC News Special Report. Uploaded on July 27, 2007. http://youtu.be/41sQCLKpi78 
Since I don't have my own Breaking News countdown clock yet... 

Question: How many of South Florida's 8 present or future Members of Congress have been interviewed or quoted by the Miami Herald regarding the "fiscal cliff" federal budget issue since Election Day?
Answer: ZERO.

But we all know that this would hardly come as Breaking News to any well-informed person who reads the 2012 version of that newspaper, though they still might be surprised that the Herald could do such a poor job of following a big national story by not writing about the local angle, i.e. have meaningful reporting on what this area's elected representatives to Congress were inclined to do.

The Herald of the 1970's and 1980's would've not only done something, they'd have had an entire page about it in Section A or in their Sunday Op-Ed section, with each rep. having the opportunity to try to explain -in some cases, explain away- why they believed what they did.

Not the lackluster and lazy Herald of today against the worldwide talent and resources of the N.Y. Times of today, but rather than the lackluster Herald of today against the Herald of 25 and 35 years ago that had to make do without cell phones and the crutch of the Internet, but with hard-working reporters who wanted to get the story done right, NOT run away from it.
There's your compare and contrast.

To repeat what I've written here on the blog in the past, when I lived and worked in the Washington, D.C. area from 1988-2003, because of what I did, whom I knew and what the full array of my interests were, I spoke fairly often to some print/TV reporters and columnists based in the Beltway whom you've heard of. 
We talked about all sorts of things, of course, but among them were also the general state of journalism, trends in the industry and general industry gossip.

Sometimes that took place over the phone after some bit of Breaking News, or over an Orioles game up at Camden Yards, sometimes after movies at popular restaurants, 
Other conversations took place over a hot dog and Coke from a vendor at a nearby park at lunch time -McPherson Square- on one of those sunny Spring days in Washington that are amazing, and which pull everyone out of their offices after months of cold weather, a sure sign that the baseball season is approaching.

The fact that some of these people had earned Pulitzer Prizes for their hard work and resourcefulness and had become known "names," was not something they spoke about, per se, but because they were so recognizable, it was always something in the back of my mind, even when we pretended it wasn't.

So it's with that in mind that I can tell you this with absolute certainty.
Newspapers and reporters do NOT receive the Pulitzer Prize for making a very bad habit of habitually ignoring what's right in front of them and NOT asking hard questions of elected officials facing difficult choices.
People are elected to Washington to make tough choices, after all, and reporters are supposed to ask them how they made their choice and what it is.
That's their job.
And yet...

Which of the 80 federal entitlement programs does Frederica Wilson or Joe Garcia want to seriously reform in order to avoid the fiscal cliff?

To repeat Charles Krauthammer in his Washington Post column titled, Cliff-jumping with Barack:
Where are the spending cuts, both discretionary and entitlement: Medicare, Medicaid and now Obamacare (the health-care trio) and Social Security?

I can't tell you that now because the very people in the best position to actually find out, the South Florida news media, don't want to ask, in large part I suspect because they really don't care. But I do.

If only I could bolster my argument by linking to a single example of this. 
Oh, okay, here are eight examples of that media obliviousness, courtesy(!) of the McClatchy Company's Miami Herald.
Is that enough for you?

FL-17 Frederica Wilson

FL-18 Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

FL-19 Ted Deutch

FL-20 Debbie Wasserman Schultz

FL-21 Mario Diaz-Balart

FL-22 Congressman-Elect Patrick Murphy

FL-23 Alcee Hastings


FL-25 Congressman-Elect Joe Garcia

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Ten days after Obama's speech, no Florida Democrat in U.S. House has sponsored Obama Jobs Bill -Wilson, DWS, Deutsch, Hastings, Castor...

Ten days after President Obama's speech -"pass this bill now"- no South Florida Democrat in U.S. House has sponsored his American Jobs Act -Wilson, DWS, Hastings, Deutsch, Castor...
In fact, not a single Democratic House member from Florida has done that.

Though I'm against it, you'd think the fact that some of South Florida's biggest big-mouths are playing coy thus far might be something that someone at the Miami Herald or South Florida Sun-Sentinel might've noticed, or maybe someone at one of the local TV stations.

FL-17's Frederica Wilson, who, unfortunately, is my rep in Washington, says she supports it,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/09/08/congresswoman-frederica-wilson-supports-american-jobs-act yet despite all her bombast about wanting jobs at those Congressional Black Caucus sponsored events that got so much attention, even while she did NOT, she STILL hasn't bothered to sign up as a sponsor.
Hmm-m... guess she's too busy.
Or something.

But while Rep. Wilson and her local pro-Big Government pals in Congress were doing whatever they were doing -NFL Fantasy Drafts?- since nobody else was using it, Texas Republican Louis Gohmert decided to fill the vacuum and is using use the title American Jobs Act of 2011 for his own bill, HR 2911.

Yes, the early bird does indeed get the worm.

But then this lack of enterprise journalism is hardly surprising, given where we live.
Weeks after the fact, NONE of those same news entities have yet seen fit to mention publicly that Wilson's trip to Israel a month ago came courtesy of AIPAC.

Something I told you here back on August 11th in my post titled , "Next year in Jerusalem" is right now for FL-17 Rep. Frederica Wilson, courtesy of AIPAC. But that's bad news for Americans, esp. her constituents,

Yes, that's where we live... the outer edge of the news universe: South Florida.