Wolfson Archive YouTube Channel video: On what was a Special Election night in August of 1989, WTVJ reporter Ileana Bravo reports on the historic occasion of Florida state Senator Ileana Ros-Lehtinen winning a bruising election for the then-Miami Beach based congressional seat of Claude Pepper, who had died on May 30th at the age of 88, the oldest menber of Congress. She became the first Cuban-American ever elected to Congress and first Hispanic woman elected to the U.S. House. Uploaded July 11, 2013. http://youtu.be/jeC0ZwuB4e0
Future Florida governor Jeb Bush is rather obvious in the news clip, but who else do you recognize? (Suggested title in my YouTube inbox was "Happy Birthday, Madame Congresswoman!" due to her upcoming birthday on July 15th.)
The other irony of this night, apparent to folks like me who grew-up in South Florida -but then living and working in Washington, D.C., and who knew people on Pepper's staff on The Hill- was that for many campaign cycles in the 1970's, the Republican who ran against longtime incumbent and Democratic icon Pepper was a Cuban-American businessman named Evelio Estrella, who was perhaps most noteworthy for refusing to do any campaigning in English in what was then FL-14, to the great astonishment of nearly everyone who was not Cuban-American, including the local and national news media.
Okay, so that happens once, you think.
Maybe there are no good candidates available and you have to field someone, even if a sacrificial lamb.
But Estrella ran enthusiastically several times!
Now THAT was Miami in the '70's!
Ros-Lehtinen is the current Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, just as the late Dante Fascell was, who represented Miami in Congress and whose CD extended south down to Key West.
I saw much of him over the years after I first moved to Washington in 1988 and became a regular presence at the full committee hearings as well as the European Subcommittee ones in the Rayburn Building, becoming very friendly with several members and the professional staff.
(Sometimes I'd even have lunch back with some friends there in the TV room while they watched either CNN or soap operas.)
That lasted until the GOP takeover in 1994, at which point Lee Hamilton had already succeeded Facell as Chair after he retired and didn't seek re-election in November of 1993.
As I've mentioned previously here on the blog, at various points while I was at IU,LeeHamilton had been my congressman in Bloomington.
Among the things to me that are noteworthy in this piece from last week's Washington PostThe Fix blog, about whether the Libertarian Party is cannibalizing the GOP, is that in also making the point that non-presidential Libertarian candidates did well in some places -which is news to me and other South Florida news consumers since the local media down here have yet to report this fact- is their noting that their U.S. Senate candidate in Indiana won 6% -actually 5.8% according tohttp://www.thepoliticalguide.com/Elections/2012/Senate/Indiana/1/ But in the Post's own story the following day, below, they NEVER mentioned this important fact, nor did they even mention the name of that Libertarian candidate, Andrew Horning, whose numbers clearly rose as a direct result of Richard Mourdock's campaign numbers coming back to earth after his landslide upset victory of longtime incumbent Richard Lugar in the spring GOP primary, and Mourdock's self-inflicted wounds, which he never recovered from in his battle against Joe Donnelly, which Kim Gieger of the LA Times was all over: http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-donnelly-mourdock-poll-20121102,0,7739135.story Yes, this omission in The Post was very Miami Herald-like.
Two weeks after the Obama-Romney presidential election we are finally starting to get a more-nuanced, fact-based picture of what actually took place that day and in the lead-up to it, and part of what we're seeing is that some long cherished myths and notions among the professional political class may now be gone with the wind, because they can not be proven with real voters anymore.
The Washington Post
Overselling the importance of independent voters
Posted by Glenn Kessler at 06:02 AM ET, 11/20/2012
In my opinion, this article goes a long way towards validating one of the central tenets of Rush Limbaugh's oft-repeated point that, in general, GOP political consultants worry far too much publicly about -and perhaps spend too much resources towards wooing- Independents and Undecideds.
That Mitt Romney won the support of the majority of Independent Voters in the U.S. and yet still lost the election, logically, ought to be a not-insignificant fact that should matter and be taken into account, and have a ripple effect across the political world.
Yet you can pretty well expect that by the time the new year rolls around, the very army of
consultants that Limbaugh is talking about (complaining about), will conveniently try to forget
this new fact as soon as possible because it directly challenges their personal M.O., their
business plan AND their world view.
It seems that the world does not revolve around Independent voters after all, but that news might be bad for business!
VOAvideo YouTube Channel: VOA's Jeffrey Young examines so-called "Identity Politics" in this segment of "How America Elects." Uploaded June 20, 2012. http://youtu.be/a0Hui4sEBfI
James Poulos adroitly connects-the-dots at Forbes.com re 2012 GOP's campaign's strategic/marketing mistakes, and suggests that while much of what Romney criticized (lamented) about Obama playing Identity Politics and patronizing Santa Claus to many niche voters is 100% true, GOP can't win by singing Blues re Obamanomics or chorus of "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Needy, Young & Dumb Single Women Voters?"
This afternoon I read a Forbes.com column, below, that for all practical purposes is the book-end to that earlier Mark Hendrickson piece at Forbes.com that I mentioned this morning, regarding what I perceived to be the self-serving motives of Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal and many other GOP pols and consultants' jabs at Mitt Romney, and in particular, Jindal's unfortunate moth-like affinity for TV news cameras, as if lack of exposure was his real problem.
Bobby Jindal's Jab At Mitt Romney Underscores Republicans' Dilemma
Bobby Jindal's looming Mainstream Media "Mirror Mirror" problems are closer at hand than I thought; Mark Hendrickson at Forbes.com on -what I see as Jindal's needless- "Jab At Mitt Romney Underscores Republicans' Dilemma"; Jindal is proving Rush Limbaugh's point about GOP self-regard
Romney's 'Gifts' Gaffe Highlights GOP Confusion On Obamanomics
WASHINGTON 11/15/2012 @ 11:43AM
By James Poulos
Having not particularly relished telling donors what they wanted to hear during the campaign, Romney has now taken his lumps in the thankless task of telling them what they want to hear afterward.
His honesty in this think piece about the Obama campaign's use of identity politics stands in stark contrast to many reporters, columnists and pundits who are twisting themselves into uncomfortable pretzels to deny that it was used, even though it was both obvious and successful. I encourage you to start following him because unlike many better-known pundits, like those seen on MSNBC, Poulos doesn't ask you to deny what you know about human behavior or to deny what your own eyes can see -Obama & Co. used identity politics and it worked. But will that formula actually work for non-African-American, non-presidential Democratic candidates for office? In my opinion, no. I believe it was unique to Obama and has no transferability, which is why much of the crowing I've seen and heard from many national Dems I usually respect, and in some cases actually know, who are drawing all sorts of conclusions and over-reaching on some of the implications of Election Day, reminds me of young kids patiently building sand castles at the beach with their plastic buckets and shovels.
Kids, there's a wave out there in the ocean that you can't even see now, and guess what? It's got very big plans for your castle and all your carefully-laid plans.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal gets played and walks into quicksand, led by CNN's Wolf Blitzer in his condemnation of Mitt Romney: 'We Don't Win Elections By Insulting Voters.' Jindal doesn't seem to fully appreciate the fact that if he were being equally critical of President Obama in his public comments as he was of Mitt Romney prior to his appearance here, he wouldn't be appearing on TV at all. Someone as experienced in dealing with the news media as Jindal should be smart enough to appreciate that he is on TV specifically because he fits the post-election Mainstream Media narrative, but he doesn't. Why? Is the lure of the red light on the camera that powerful to him? sadly, it would appear so, since it's easy to see that when he says something in the future that the same news media wants to exaggerate or misrepresent because it doesn't jibe with the narrative that they want to put forth to the country, who does Jindal think will help him when he's complaining about being left out to dry, the Republican governors? Hardly. It's so damn laughable. And you'll notice that Jindal is so concentrated on blasting Romney and mouthing high-minded feel-good cliches that he never has the good sense to pivot and turn things around by saying, matter of factly, "On the other hand, Wolf, I sure don't envy you and CNN and the rest of the Beltway media on Inauguration Day trying to remind your viewers what the big idea or ideas proposed by President Obama during the campaign were. You know, the ideas or plans that you and CNN presumably plan on holding him to account for in the new year. No, I don't envy you because there weren't any." Nope! There's none of that sort of quick thinking on his feet. LOL! Uploaded November 15, 2012. http://youtu.be/IUsXAseSeXg
Bobby Jindal's looming Mainstream Media "Mirror Mirror" problems are closer at hand than I thought; Mark Hendrickson at Forbes.com on -what I see as Jindal's needless- "Jab At Mitt Romney Underscores Republicans' Dilemma"; Jindal is proving Rush Limbaugh's point about GOP self-regard
TheMark Hendricksoncolumn at Forbes.com that I received late Friday night was clearly written before Friday morning's New Orleans Times-Picayuneeditorial blasting Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal for resisting creating an Obamacare health insurance exchange.
Forbes.com
Bobby Jindal's Jab At Mitt Romney Underscores Republicans' Dilemma
In my opinion, despite all his many admirable qualities and talents, it's likely that Bobby Jindal will STILL likely be trying to reason with the national news media and East Coast elites over the next few years even as they're verbally lynching him by twisting his words and making him seem either ridiculous or dangerous (or both) in ways that he, his friends and supporters can't even imagine now. Well after the point that it's been clear to me and many others I know that those elites are "just not that into him."
To them, Jindal's an interesting oddity, the fish-out-of-water that complicates their usual patronizing view of The South, so far from the norms of Manhattan and the Beltway. He's the human anecdote to bring out when important guests come over and you've got the fine china out on the table and want to show you're refined.
For such a very smart guy, remarkable actually, he displays an air of unreality about him at times that's positively frightening, almost childlike, and truly disconnected from the political history of the past 25 years in this country, where people like him are left on the side of the road.
It's as if Jindal thinks -not unlike John Edwards or Bill Clinton- that he can single-handedly talk anyone and everyone he meets into agreeing that he's not only uniquer-than-unique, but also quite correct on the public policy as well.
In many uncomfortable ways, to me, after years of seeing interviews with him on every matter of policy shows and forums and reading what he's written, Jindal seems like Exhibit A from Central Casting in what radio host Rush Limbaugh regularly says about a certain sub-set of Republican pols and consultants who care, desperately, about what the Beltway news media and pundit class think about him.
Just like former GOP senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson, who was never more popular with the Beltway and East Coast MSM than when he was publicly disparaging the House Republicans in the '90's, esp. Newt Gingrich. As I know even better, that was especially the role carved out by the media for Indina Senator Richard Lugar, who for so many years played the role of shadow Secretary of State, even while taking things for granted back in Indiana, where I went to school. It's also one of the chief reasons he lost the GOP primary to Richard Mourdock in a landslide. Sen. Lugar had become the very picture of the media-absorbed pol, albeit a very smart and articulate one, and it was hard fro me not to notice, even before I came back to South Florida in 2003, that he was increasingly getting on TV, on the front pages of major newspapers or being cited in Thomas L. Friedman columns not because of what he had to say about foreign policy, but because he was so consistently willing to publicly criticize other Republicans' policies or ideas. The MSM found him a 'useful idiot' for their purposes of supporting Democratic policies.
All of that is something that was discussed back on May 16th in a post titled, Richard Mourdock: Precursor or anomaly? Greg Garrison and Charlie Cook adroitly pinpoint where Sen. Richard Lugar eventually lost his way, started losing the trust of Hoosier voters, then lost in a landslide due to the dis-connect. Points largely lost on a predictably apoplectic Beltway MSM http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/richard-mourdock-precursor-or-anomaly.html
What Limbaugh says about that is 100% true, in large part because it's simple human
nature, as I witnessed for 15 years while living and working in D.C. with many Republican
friends who were staffers who worked for bosses on The Hill or the agencies who were constantly being fooled into thinking that someone in the Beltway media and Think Tank Cool Crowd really liked them.
Who doesn't want to be liked?
That was the central conceit with many new younger male Members of Congress, many of whom were fortunate to be born with either connections, money or good looks because they sure WEREN'T very bright.
They were so used to people deferring to them that they couldn't tell when they were being played.
Those folks didn't like them, of course, they just wanted to have them around long enough to have some fun at their expense, before eventually tiring of them and sending them packing like Mean Girls -dismissed!
Unless he wises up pretty soon and recognizes reality and stops caring so much what the national news media thinks about him, that's Bobby Jindal's future -mockery and put-downs by the very news media that he so desperately wants to persuade thru his genuine brilliance.
Fox news video: Rising GOP star Mia Love glides into the spotlight at Republican National Convention in Tampa, FL. Published August 28, 2012 http://video.foxnews.com/v/1810973848001/ Related article at: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/08/28/republican-convention-to-feature-rising-star-mia-love/ More proof of how far the Miami Herald has fallen: Mia Love, New York-born Haitian-American, Republican mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, GOP candidate for Utah-4, gets ZERO coverage in Herald, in home of America's largest Haitian diaspora. Hmm-m.. maybe if she owned a nightclub or retro dress shop in South Beach they'd notice her...
Mia Love To Obama: "We're Not Buying What You're Selling" http://youtu.be/r2Cbvewaa7g Not a single article even on the night she speaks in prime-time at the RNC:
WallStreetJournalDigitalNetwork video: Why Florida May Be a Reach for Obama. Correspondent Arian Campo-Flores reports from Miami and explains why the fickle Sunshine State may not be President Obama's for the taking in November, and what Mitt Romney and the GOP will have to do to win this important swing state. July 19, 2012.http://youtu.be/t8y18Kh6JWA
sandyfrazier9 video: RealClear Politics Executive Editor Tom Bevan spoke with guest host Tucker Carlson on Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity Show about how Obama and the Democrats finally decided how they'd attempt to portray Mitt Romney in Tv ads to Independent and Moderates, without whom Obama can't be re-elected, and what issues or factors will most affect whom Romney selects to be his running-mate . Surprise!Someone who will "do no harm" and allow the focus of the campaign to remain firmly on Obama and make it a referendum on his failed stewardship of the economy. Posted July 2, 2012. http://youtu.be/plgk8sPzgwc-
Better than Truthy with Stephen Colbert, it's Newsy Politics, with IU grad Lauren Gores in Missouri:multiple-sourced -the way news used to be!
NewsyPolitics video: Economic woes wounding Obama, says new NYT/CBS News poll. July 19, 2012. http://youtu.be/ntoPzskr43k
*FYI: Local 10'sMichael Putney, a University of Missouri grad, will interview President Obama Friday for Channel 10's 6 o'clock newscast in Miami. Have a good question that ought to be asked of the president? Send it to Michael at share@local10.com
View Larger Map ----- The Weekly Standard Washington Loses Power And not just from a storm. By Fred Barnes July 16, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 41
For Washington, this is definitely not the best of times. The town is suffering from a power outage.
The evidence is hard to miss, from Washington’s weeklong struggle to cope with storm damage that knocked out electricity across the region to President Obama’s inability to awaken the economy, as reflected once again in June’s pathetic jobs report.
To make matters worse, Washing-ton is out of sync with the country, at least with the noncoastal parts. The usual response is to unleash the president so he can rally America to Washington’s purposes. But the bully pulpit hasn’t been effective since Ronald Reagan was in the White House. And Obama has failed to revive it.
MarcoRubio video: Senator Marco Rubio of Florida on NBC News' "Meet the Press" speaks with host David Gregory regarding his new autobiography, "An American Son," and his current stance on immigration, one day before the Supreme Court's ruling on Arizona's laws re illegal immigration. June 24, 2012.
MarcoRubio video: Senator Marco Rubio of Florida on CBS' "This Morning" speaks with hosts Charlie Rose and Erica Hill regarding his new autobiography, "An American Son," his being considered as Mitt Romney's VP choice, and his current stance on immigration. June 21, 2012.
Richard Mourdock: Precursor or anomaly? Greg Garrison and Charlie Cook -separately- adroitly pinpoint where Sen. Richard Lugar eventually lost his way, started losing the trust of Hoosier voters, then lost in a landslide due to the dis-connect. Points largely lost on a predictably apoplectic Beltway MSM
The best reasoned analysis I've read thus far of why Sen. Lugar lost in the GOP primary last week -and lost badly- is by the one-and-only Charlie Cook last week and Breitbart.com'sGreg Garrison today.
THE COOK REPORT
Lugar’s Downfall
Don’t just chalk up the Indiana Republican’s primary defeat to the tea party. It’s more complicated than that.
By Charlie Cook
Updated: May 11, 2012 | 1:39 p.m.
May 10, 2012 | 4:00 p.m.
One way to explain Sen. Richard Lugar’s loss to state Treasurer Richard Mourdock in this week’s Indiana Republican primary is to attribute it to a tea party takeover of the GOP. A second explanation is that a venerable public servant overstayed his welcome and ran for reelection one time too many. A third is that Lugar was too focused on international relations and grew too distant from his state—that he didn’t keep his political fences mended back home.
He was 16 when I was born, Mayor of Indianapolis (my home town) when I was a student at IU, and off to the US Senate when I was a ripe old 28; been there ever since. And a few hours after having seen him take a beating most uncommon in American politics—he lost to Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock by 21 points in yesterday’s primary—the confetti has just stopped floating to the floor and empty beer cans have barely stopped rolling around as we look with mixed feelings at the phenomenon just experienced.
Both before and after I first moved to the Washington, D.C. area in 1988, where I lived and worked for 15 years, other than maybe Sam Nunn in Georgia, Daniel Inouye in Hawaii or Teddy Kennedy in Massachusetts, I don't think there was another senator more firmly linked in the minds of both voters and the local and national news media with their own home state than Dick Lugar was with Indiana, who was already a U.S. Senator when I first moved to Bloomington from North Miami Beach in August of 1979 for my freshman year at IU.
Then, and for 25 years afterwards, it was simply inconceivable for anyone who knew anything about Indiana politics and the people of the state to imagine any logical scenario where he would ever lose an election, even if he should've retired after his last term ended in 2006.
Thirty years was long enough, though, and lots of voters who had voted for Lugar their entire life had become disenchanted with both him, his policies and his increasingly-curious priority choices.
As I've mentioned here previously, too, I was actually at the televised Birch Bayh-Dan QuayleSenate debate atIUin 1980, sitting in the second row of sweltering Whittenberger Auditorium at the IMU, where I usually sat to watch films on weekend nights, glad to be somewhere where people cared about ideas and public policy, even if they weren't always the ones that I agreed with or thought were most logical or reasonable.
After growing-up in the completely unrepresentative South Florida of the 1970's, with no Black or Hispanic congressmen and everyone on the Dade County Commission voted in at-large, the best-case scenario for lobbyists, I was happy to be somewhere where every vote counted for something.
A place where actual political debates took place, even if they didn't exactly match the lofty rhetoric of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858; the election Lincoln lost in case you forgot, before he was elected president two years later.
On Election Night 1980, I spent a lot of time going from one place to another for various election return parties, on and off-campus, in retrospect, the news about Bayh losing to Quayle was merely the precursor.
I eventually made my way tothe dorm room of a friend there at Briscoe Quad where I lived that year, a friend who just happened to be the IU Student Association president.
As first, George McGovern, John Culver and other well-known Dems bit the dust, and then Reagan was acclaimed the winner over President Carter, the large crowd became the very personification of an election wake, filled with gallows humor -and clever remarks about someone making a race competitive by only losing by ten percentage points!
The next time I was in a place that Blue and sad following election returns was at The Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill for the mid-term 1994 elections, when I thought the GOP would take the House, but my friends on The Hill told me that my famous intuition was wrong, something it rarely was.
By the end of the night, many of my friends were actually crying real tears as they saw their always-interesting Capitol Hill jobs get eliminated before their eyes, when their bosses lost in the Gingrich Revolution, while people who for years had been on the Majority Staff of House committees realized that the new math would get them gone, in part, because of how they'd run things and treated the Republican staffers.
NPR Audio: The Bigger Picture Of Indiana's Senate Race:
NPR's Scott Simon talks with Hoosier political analyst Brian Howey of the Howey Indiana Politics newletter about Richard Mourdock's landslide defeat of Sen. Richard Lugar last Tuesday in the GOP Senate primary
Above, the cover of Broward County Commission candidate Marty Kiar's recent four-page direct mail to NW Broward County voters. If you think that a mailing with this cover would be light on ideas or issues, esp. those involving the County Commission, the group he wants to join, you'd be right. But then have you read his tweets?
Over the past nine months, for the most part, if you didn't know any better, you'd never even guess that Kiar lived in Broward County, because whether it's the issue of ethics and scruples or rather the obvious lack of them at times on the County and municipal level here by elected officials and well-paid administrators and employees, the overwhelming evidence that red-light cameras in Broward are being used primarily as revenue generators for cities instead of for the public safety purposes elected officials say they are when installing them, the County's curious garbage contract monopoly, Broward County Commissioners fighting term-limits overwhelmingly voted in as law by Broward citizens, et al, Kiarnever mentions important public policy matters that were actually being publicly discussed and voted upon in THIS county -and what he thinks about them. But then again, he is only 34-years old.
I find it very troubling that considering all the advantages that he enjoys, he's SO MUCH of a blank slate instead of being a more fully-formed and informed citizen. I seriously hope that voters living in District 8 will see more civic-minded candidates entering the race in the next four weeks, people who are NOT as tied-in to the Status Quo society in this county as Kiar is, so they can have at least one candidate to consider who will not only know the facts and know their own mind, but NOT hedge what they publicly says now because of being SO CONCERNED about election campaigns in the future, as Kiar seems to be. April 22, 2012 photo by South Beach Hoosier.
Did you see Marty Kiar's tweet about why FL Fair Districts & the FL Democrats NEVER made public -and submitted- their Redistricting maps when they had the chance? Actually, he never did.
On the other hand, Kiar, who, as I wrote the other day here, is running for the Broward County Comm. District 8 seat currently held by term-limited Ilene Lieberman, never neglected to tell us what he perceived to be very important insider info on all sorts of matters.
Things like how many miles he ran that day in preparation for running in a marathon, and how many doors he knocked on -he actually did it during Dolphins home loss to Tebow-led Broncos and a later home win against Buffalo- mentioned that he was at various state Redistricting meetings around the state and, even -wait for it- the sex of his unborn child, the latter being a fact that nobody outside of his family and immediate circle of friends could possibly care about... and TMI.
On October 19th of last year he even tweeted a link to an Orlando Sentinel editorial about two companion bills dealing with the public's right to speak to elected officials at public meetings that he and Sen. Joe Negron of Stuart offered, Senate Bill 206 and HB 355. Bills that I and almost everyone reading this blog would wholeheartedly agree with, in my case, because of what I and my friends and other HB residents have had to deal with for years at Hallandale Beach City Hall. http://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Bills/billsdetail.aspx?BillId=47498
(Residency-challenged Rep. Frank Artiles of House 119 voted against it on 2/3/12 in the Rulemaking & Regulation Subcommittee, but it still passed 12-3.)
Similarly, he tweets that he ran the Disney Marathon but, incredulously, doesn't give his time. Really.
As someone with a sister who runs in a lot of marathons across the country, I can say with little chance of being wrong that Marty Kiar may be the first person in the history of Twitter -at least in South Florida- to run a marathon, mention it in a tweet but NOT give his time, even if it isn't a PR.
He mentions the sex of his soon-too-be second child but the subject of Democratic-drawn maps that conformed to the two Constitutional Amendments that were overwhelmingly approved by Florida voters, something that was in the news about every day for a couple of months, he tweets nothing about? Yes.
That's very curious when you consider that for better than a year, we were all told over-and-over by the members of the Florida news media that the people running Fair Districts Floridawanted us to know that they were really looking out for all our best interests after we came thru and gave them the big election victories, but on the other hand, they also wanted us to know that the Florida GOP, on the other hand, well, you know them.
They'll do nothing but try to obfuscate and prevent the people of this state from ever seeing competitive districts drawn for a change so that real ideas and issues might matter more than PAC contributions or a candidates race, ethnicity or religion. You know the Florida GOP, they said with a sly wink, they'll keep up the long and treasured Sunshine State tradition of pols choosing their districts, rather than have voters choose them, the way it was always explained in high school Social Studies books once upon a time.
Yet what did THEY do?
So now that it's the first week of May and state legislative elections with the Republican-drawn court-approved maps will be held in six months, how come Fair Districts Florida and the Florida Democratic Party STILL haven't explained to the public why they NEVER officially submitted maps to the Florida Senate Redistricting Comm.?
Why?
And better yet, why doesn't the Mainstream News Media in this state, the nation's fourth-largest I remind you, care a whit about that, and never mentionthat salient fact in their stories about the court siding with the Florida GOP and what those new maps mean?
Not just real competition in some cases, but incumbents running against one another, always a good thing?
It's like they all have a bad case of situational amnesia, and are feigning not knowing what I and many of you reading this already know.
It's galling, just like Kiar's precious tweets.
Yes, it's not only a case of late with the Florida Democratic Party being the dog that doesn't hunt, but when you toss in the incurious state news media to the mix, it's a case of the watchdog that never barks.
Calling all Super Sleuths: Are you a good enough detective to solve this Mainstream Media news mystery?; Kathleen Parker and the Miami Herald's longstanding lack of columnist diversity
If you saw the following five headlines in print or online, what would be your first guess as to what you'd just come across?
Mitt’s convention speech -In his own words. Well, almost.
Santorum’s failed pander - A false and snobbish attack on the president.
Out-of-touch Republicans - Romney and Santorum’s struggles bode ill for GOP.
Santorum’s war against elites - Campaigning with a chip on his shoulder.
Pushing Michigan away - Why the GOP won’t win the state in November.
What would be your guess for the source of this rather limited political perspective?
a.) A subscriber-only website for wealthy Democratic bundlers, all of whom are members in good standing of "Friends of O"?
b.) A college newspaper of a mid-sized Liberal Arts college in Ohio, with lots of high-minded, moralistic and incurious young women columnists who never attend their own school's home football or basketball games, and who aim to fit right in at some large East Coast newspaper, and just so they leave no doubt about where their political allegiances lie, they make sure they're right there in black & white.
c.) A special preview of the forthcoming print version of the monthly KosKooks4America comic bookthat will be bankrolled by George Soros?
d.) Your own local area's weekly VillageVoice-ownedfree newspaper that runs all those escort ads in the back, which opts NOT to do very much original enterprise reporting on local government or politics, opting instead to wait for the MSM to actually report their Conventional Wisdom take on the news, at which point the free newspaper's so-called reporters will run ten sentences of rants based on whatever the MSM headline is.
Those of you who are more Sherlock Holmes and Patrick Jane than Inspector Clouseau in your sleuthing will no doubt be pleased to discover that your intuition and instincts are still well-developed and accurate.
My screenshot of today's Washington Post Opinions page email, which I receive everyday.
Yes, that bastion of journalism diversity, where you too can find gainful employment as a reporter, editor or columnist, regardless of your sex, race, sexual persuasion or whichever Ivy League school you graduated from, as long as you are a team player and know how to sing in a choir without being asked.
You will NOT ad lib or deviate from the gospel according to The Washington Post.
The guilty parties above are, respectively:
Dana Milbank, Mitt’s convention speech, In his own words. Well, almost.
Kathleen Parker, Santorum’s failed pander, A false and snobbish attack on the president.
Harold Meyerson, Out-of-touch Republicans, Romney and Santorum’s struggles bode ill for GOP.
Ruth Marcus, Santorum’s war against elites, Campaigning with a chip on his shoulder.
Katrina vanden Heuvel, Pushing Michigan away, Why the GOP won’t win the state in November.
If there's anything above that deserves special attention due to its ironic nature, it's Kathleen Parker calling out Rick Santorum for calling President Obama being a snob. Ironic because the worst kind of insufferable snob is one that won't admit it, and that's what KathleenParker is.
Well, that is besides being a journalist with a rather convenient memory, which is almost mandatory to be a card-carrying member of the MSM. Which is to say that when reality bursts her version of the world, she finds it easy to either compartmentalize what challenges that view, or forget it entirely. But aren't the facts supposed to matter?
Tell me, in this April 2008 video, who is Hillary Clinton accusing of being an elitist snob?
Hillary Clinton responds to Barack Obama's remarks to Democratic Party supporters at San Francisco fundraiser that "Small towns cling to guns or religion" http://youtu.be/xNoJ0q6HrK8
"Pennsylvanians don't need a president who looks down on them. They need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them, who works hard for your futures, your jobs, your families."
A close examination of Parker's own past columns over the years show what a genuine hypocrite and snob she is, when, at various times, in order to make herself more marketable, she's tried to create new identities for herself.
For a while, Parker tried to cultivate a public image of herself as the 'thoughtful Moderate,' who called-out the excesses of both liberals and conservatives, or, if she thought that it would play better, cast herself as the modern-day educated "Southern" woman columnist, someone who was game to play at being semi-folksy in calculated ways once in a while to differentiate herself from the gray blather around her, esp. when she was in Orlando. http://www.jewishworldreview.com/kathleen/parker091008.php3?printer_friendly
Sure, because Orlando was the South! Maybe to someone who never leaves Manhattan.
Locally, there's really no telling why the Miami Herald foolishly has persisted in running Parker's all-so-predictable columns, or even worse, running those of awful Mary Sanchez of the Kansas City Star, whose dreary and unoriginal columns sound exactly like the Herald's own Editorial Board's predictable and myopic view of the world, esp. on illegal immigration, rather than make any serious effort to develop their own clever and original South Florida-based conservative or moderate columnist, whose fresh, idea-filled columns would run in the OpEd section, not in the State & Local section, which as most sharp-eyed observers would agree, is THE most predictable section of a newspaper its size in America. Stale and reeking of moth balls.
If you agree, and I know that many of you do, given the feedback I get about the state of the Herald in emails and at various public policy or govt. events throughout South Florida, where I run into and speak to friends and colleagues and people who at least claim to read the blog, maybe you should share your concerns about that (and the Miami Herald's general state of listlessness) with Herald publisher David Landsberg about his singular lack of vision and ambition for the paper in the 21st Century.
In case you forgot, I already have -a few times. And publicly posted it here on the blog for all to see.
In any case, for whatever illogical reason they have, the Herald keeps running Parker and yet when push comes to shove, how does her column really differ fundamentally in its message from reflexively liberal Dana Milbank's or Eugene Robinson's?
That's just it, it doesn't. It's the chorus effect. Lots and lots of the very same perspective are NOT equivalent to a diversity of opinions.
