I love a good story as well as the next person, more than most, actually, but that said, there's no way that five days on a top-of-the-line yacht for Scott Israel, his wife and three kids to The Bahamas cost Broward's Sheriff less than twice the cost for me -alone- staying at a very nice B&B -with absolutely delicious breakfast but withoutelevators to my 3rd-floor room- for four days in the Södermalm neighborhood of expensive Stockholm.
In January, the coldest month of the year, and, yes, definitely off-season!
Just saying...
A well-informed friend writes me that after watching this video and thinking about the high level of endemic corruption and longstanding culture of wink-wink back-scratching attitudes among elected officials and their bankrolling friends here in Broward already, the most-corrupt county in the country's fourth-largest state, their sad prediction is that Sheriff Israel will be making a lot of headlines in the coming years for all the wrong reasons.
I tend to agree, absent something big happening in the next year that causes his judgement to fundamentally get better.
I sent an email with most of this info to lots of people throughout the state to get their take on it, as well as to blogger Robert Wechsler of cityethics.org up in Connecticut, hoping that he will consider giving this matter that at first blush fails the smell test, his usual careful ethical scrutiny and give it the column inches it deserves, which he has given other Florida ethical situations, including a few I first alerted him to.
More from Local10 investigative reporter Bob Norrman on the epidemic in Broward County of elected officials living outside districts they represent, contrary to the FL Constitution; FL state Senator Jack Latvala, Chair of Senate's Ethics & Elections Comm. -and a recent recipient of my emails about whats' really going on in Hallandale Beach- will NOT tolerate this blatant corruption and wants investigations launched into these illegal actions right now!; And let's not forget FL state Rep. Joe Gibbons' strange views on raising a family -putting an elective office ABOVE living full-time with your own kids!
Updated at 2:45 p.m. This is but the latest chapter of several sordid chapters in the serial criminal misrepresentation I have written about here at HBB over the past year or so on candidates and elected officials who do NOT live in the legislative districts they want to represent or do currently represent.
But somehow, the pols involved can never answer a simple question face-to-face, "Why do you refuse to live with the very citizens you say you want to represent?"
This longtime scandal has been exposed in a major way over the past few months thanks to the diligent hard work and resourcefulness of Local10'sBob Norman, Tom Lauder of Media Trackers Florida -who is also Red Broward- and my friend Stephanie Kienzle of VotersOpinion.com, the very enthusiastic blog that covers the Northeast Miami-Dade cities of North Miami Beach and North Miami -a.k.a. my old 'stomping grounds' for those of you out there who remember the wonderfully delicious days of Figaro's Pizza and the Lum's on N.E. 167th Street in NMB, and Marcella's Italian Restaurant on W. Dixie Highway in North Miami.. My last two blog posts on this sore subject, full of facts and videos, were:
JULY 5, 2013 More on Broward County politicians' residency ruse: Is intentionally violating & evading the Florida Constitution 'the new normal' for ethical standards in the Sunshine State? Latest facts & chronology regarding at least 5 Florida legislators from Broward -and one Broward Commissioner- who DON'T live full-time in the districts they were elected to represent http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2013/07/more-on-broward-county-politicians.html
JULY 2, 2013
Is Kristin Jacobs poised to become 'the last straw' and the cynical face for voters of the ever-expanding Broward candidate residency scandal? Yet MORE residency problems in Broward County per Media Tracker Florida: Jacobs wants to run for FL House 96 while living in House 93, even while convincing evidence suggests that at least 5 current members of the Broward Legislative Delegation may be knowingly breaking state law, practically daring Broward State's Attorney Mike Satz & Co. to actually do something; Videos by Local10 investigative reporter Bob Norman show he's NOT afraid to go after South Florida's unethical pols and ask the hard questions
The three of them have been positively ingenious and patient about observing our local pols and pol-wannabe's in their natural state of obfuscation and mis-representation, and in Stephanie's case, highlighting the almost-comical situation where a woman who lives in Miramar in Broward County, wanted to run for City Commission in North Miami Beach in Miami-Dade County, and who almost got away with it if not for Stephanie's dedicated zeal to prevent yet another repeat of what the video up top represents.
Correct, as if they were all just running At-Large from South Florida
Speaking of being At-Large, I realized last night that in my many previous posts about FL state Rep. Joe Gibbons and his very questionable residency situation, which for so many years, to my great, great frustration, only Bob Norman and myself seemed to care a whit about, I neglected to include a link to a short-but-pithy post I'd written on him last year that dealt publicly with his very strange family living situation, which he prefers not to talk about publicly because of how selfish and self-serving he comes out in the tale.
It's my June 17, 2012 post titled, Today, on Father's Day, where are FL Rep. Joseph "Joe" Gibbons' children celebrating with him? Likely up in the Jacksonville area where they all live, NOT in Broward County where he pretends he lives full-time
By the way, now that I think about it, WTF, Channel 10?
How is it that Channel 10 is NOT tweeting these video reports of gold by Bob Norman on their own Twitter feed while tweeting all sorts of the usual blather we associate with TV station twitter feed product?
The only reference to Bob Norman's Wednesday's story on Twitterwith his name attached was by a citizen from FTL named Marcelo Medina, but who didn't include the Channel 10 link to the story.
@wplglocal10 Congratulations for the investigation about the representatives living in different counties...great job #Bob Norman — Marcelo Medina (@mmarcelomedi) July 11, 2013
I don't blame the Fort Lauderdale resident, whom I'd never heard of, and who doesn't appear to be a member of Broward's massive Govt./Politics/Lobbying Industrial Complex, instead I blame the management and staff at Channel 10 who clearly aren't paying more attention to what's right in front of them that's captured everyone's attention, since most reasonable people, regardless of ideology, think it's NOT too much to ask that people running for elective office actually live where the voters do.
The station needs to actually start thinking outside-the-box, and by the way, is there not a single intern at the station who could be doing that necessary tweeting?
(I've written about this previously on the blog but that was a while back, so for you more recent readers here's a story about me and Channel 10
Many years ago, 1981 to be exact, I was supposed to be a summer intern at Channel 10 while home for the summer from IU, back when their studios were still down on Biscayne Blvd. and N.E. 39th Street.
Long story short: despite earning the job thru a great cover letter and excellent follow-up interview at the station, the Chair of the Telecommunications Dept. at IUwould NOT allow me to accept the position because he said the Dept. needed all their students who were Seniors-to-be to get gigs like that, not Juniors-to-be like me.
I explained to them that while I understood their position, not only was Channel 10 the top-ranked TV news station in Florida, but that it was a Post-Newsweek station, which meant that if I did a very good job, it might help me nab an internship the following summer in D.C., either at the Washington Post or Newsweek magazine's D.C. HQ
And besides, there were no other IU students who were Juniors seeking the job, just me, and I was the only person the station's Personnel Director wanted for the job.
But it didn't matter. What opportunity giveth, IU tookth away. #stillangry)
Obviously, I haven't spoken to Bob Norman about it so have no idea if he'd even be interested, but why is there no discussion at all of the idea of giving him his own half-hour TV show on the weekends that deal with the intersection of Broward government and politics, with reporters, columnists and bloggers on as guests, but with elected officials, lobbyists, sycophants and PR apple polishers not regularly allowed on the show?
A show that would deal with larger issues like ethics and why smart policies and certain issues are not given the time of day, while bad ideas like The Wave streetcar in Fort Lauderdale, a boondoggle in the waiting, DO get approved, despite the facts staring at the City of Fort Lauderdale -their residents don't want it.
But the downtown Fort Lauderdale business crowd does want it, for perfectly selfish reasons, even though there's nothing to do downtown during the day save the Art Museum, as I will be writing about this weekend.
Yes, something very much along the lines of the weekly DC Politics Hour show that I have written about here previously, one of the things that I desperately missed once coming back to South Florida, even though I could hear it online.
(It just wasn't the same once I got out of The Beltway and could anticipate the stories they'd be talking about and already knew the context for the ones that did come up.)
Much of Greater Washington listened to it religiously every Friday at Noon on WAMU-FM, the NPR station at American University that was the talk/public policy center of the radio universe in D.C., with co-hosts Derek McGinty and Mark Plotkin and then Kojo Nmadi after Derek left for CBS-TV in 1998 after doing some excellent freelance reporting work with Bryant Gumbel on cable.
And to make a good thing better, they'd have the Maryland or Virginia Politics Hour once a month in the second hour at 1 p.m., and often had the governor on to take calls from listeners that were anything-but-friendly and who'd level the governor under a tsunami of logical facts that the guest reporters from Annapolis, Charlottesville, Baltimore, Richmond or the Wash. Post beat reporters of the state capitol couldn't do anything but sit back and watch the fun.
To quote myself, there's NOTHING even remotely like that anywhere in South Florida on Tv or radio.
It was great, and it's not just that everyone I knew, plus official Washington, listened to that show, but how from even a pure numbers point-of-view, it was the only real competition that the Rush Limbaugh Show on AM talk powerhouse WMAL ever had in the Washington market at noon.
It was fun, informative and there was always something interesting or perplexing that you heard that left you excited, puzzled or even downright scared at who was actually representing you in government as the weekend approached.
As if the retro Soviet-style bureaucracy at Arlington County HQ that looked upon citizen taxpayers like me as as, alternately, cash cows or guinea pigs, wasn't bad enough!
In those pre-Internet, pre-blog days, that radio show was the best forum in all of Greater Washington for regularly zeroing-in on all the mountains of unsatisfactory performances and illegal and ethically-troubling behavior going on by city, county and state officials, which kept the jails busy.
If I were the News Director at Channel 10, I'd do that ASAP and have it ready to roll come September, especially since there are hours and hours and hours of nothing but infomercials on Channel 10 after Noon on Saturday and Sundays, which I find pretty embarrassing, frankly.
Obviously that completely changes for Saturdays once college football season starts up late next month so why not have such a needed program at 10 a.m. on Sundays as the lead-in to This Week With George Stephanopoulos, followed-up by Michael Putney with his excellent This Week in South Florida? A nice two-hour bloc of serious news in an area that is literally starving for more serious news coverage and analysis. ----- Sen. Jack Latvala's webpage on Florida Senate website: http://www.flsenate.gov/Senators/s20 As you can see from the video above, Sen. Latvala's already shown he's more than a little upset and is keen on getting the ball moving rapidly towards formal investigations and prosecutions, but let him know that you, too, are fed-up and won't tolerate any more of the despicable business-as-usual/wink-wink attitude in South Florida of the Florida Constitution. You can reach him at "Latvala, Sen. Jack" <latvala.jack.web@flsenate.gov>
The interview with Rep. Frederica Wilson concludes at 13:04 mark.
Well, to use a phrase that nobody uses any longer, "Here's mud in your eye."
For those of you who have doubted what I've said in the past to you, whether in person somewhere in South Florida or the Washington, D.C. area, or what you've read here on the blog, about the weirdly, disconnected sense of reality lived by many though not all of South Florida's pols, almost all of whom live in gerrymandered districts that ensure their election come the general elections, Sunday morning brought forth the latest glaring example of disconnected unreality.
Did you see it, too?
Did your jaw hit the ground at the stale memorized talking points being recited like a not-so-bright Third Grader standing in front of the class?
Did you get a real sinking feeling when you heard so much prattle expressed with so little thought or insight behind it, and realized that the silly person mouthing such nonsense makes $174,000 a year?
Yes, welcome to the second decade of South Florida politics in the 21st Century.
All of this came in the form of an alternately abysmal performance by freshman Rep. Frederica Wilson (FL-17) on Channel 10's "This Week in South Florida" with Senior Political Editor Michael Putney.
As most of you blog readers know by now, I respect him more than any other media personality in South Florida -even when we disagree- in large part, because he actually remembers many of the very same people, places and events of the past that I do, good and bad, that so many people, groups and institutions consciously prefer to forget.
(So many South Florida media types I've met either know very little about this area's political history and geography, or flat-out don't care, but that's another post for another time.)
The ostensible purpose of Wilson's appearance -from Washington- in the lead-off (longest) block of the popular public affairs program, was to discuss the federal debt limit crisis, the state of the economy, and to elicit her opinion on what specific steps should be undertaken.
As she has been a cipher since getting elected, I didn't expect much, but even my low expectations were too high.
Prior to this July 31st appearance with Michael Putney, NOT a single legitimate reporter in Florida had so much as asked Wilson even a reasonably hard question about this debt limit issue and asked her to explain herself on the issue.
Trust me, I've looked at searches for her on Google News day-after-day, and even emailed that to friends, who were shocked at how asleep the South Florida news media has been all these months.
Not me.
(I was even going to post all the citations & news articles here so you could see what lapdogs the South Florida press corps has been towards Wilson since she got elected. Minus the stories on Haiti, Edison & Central High Schools getting special treatment to stay open, or her hats, there wasn't much left, which made it easy for me to read all the articles. Just saying...)
In fact, I was going to post this blog post Sunday morning until I saw that she was going to be on the show. Then I decided to wait until Channel 10 put the link up to theentire broadcast so you could see it for yourself.
To me, Wilson has held common sense and taxpayers "hostage" for months without saying anything of merit, to use a word that she twice went out of her way to use to refer to Tea Party supporters, implying, like so many disconnected liberals, that their desire to actually have a more fundamentally sound financial structure for the country was dangerous.
(Unlike Wilson, some Americans inherently know that not every single federal program deserves to live in perpetuity, or to be equated with apple pie and the Bill of Rights. But try getting Wilson to name one to cut...)
As if, somehow, liberal families and their children were somehow immune to the very negative logical consequences of a template where the U.S. government borrows 40 cents for every dollar it spends, as Sen. Marco Rubio has said any number of times lately.
It won't surprise you a whit that her prescription was the usual one of a person who reps a gerrymandered majority-minority CD in Congress: spend, spend, spend...
And tax the "rich" especially the evil oil companies, whom she says pay nothing in taxes in the same exact way that small children routinely say dumb things but nobody bothers to correct them because they are, after all, just small children.
They're entitled to their fantasy world for a while.
Small children, not congresswomen.
Despite her own past actions and words to burden small business owners with more regulation and higher fees, she demands that someone create jobs in her CD, which has the dubious distinction of having among the lowest investment rates and one of the highest murder rates in the entire congress.
After you hear Wilson, you'd almost have to ask yourself why if you were a business owner seeking to expand, why would someone invest in poorly-educated, blame-someone else FL-17?
Now there's a question.
Wilson seems unable to appreciate the changed environment that has taken over this country the past few years, nor to appreciate the difference between being in Tallahassee and Washington.
The reality is that her constituents without jobs are going to be expected to do a whole lot more for themselves in the future than they have in the past, and that includes the strong possibility that for many of them, that choice involves leaving the area, as happens in every other part of the country.
Uncle Sam is not going to be dropping pallets of money into NW Miami anytime soon.
That plane has been permanently grounded.
Time to adapt!
When Michael Putney brought this poll up, do I even have to tell you that Wilson is a fervent supporter of the minority opinion? The one that says that we just have to keep doing the same things that don't work? It's mind-boggling sometimes, almost as if she has been in a coma.
Watching her appearance on TWISF made me think of many things but none quite so strong as the sense that she's so very used to only being around people that completely agree with her, that she literally has no ability or intuition to appreciate that, for a change, she really needed to come across on the program as a serious and sober official.
Instead, because it's her shtick, and she can't help herself, she chose on the air wearing one of the dozens of ridiculous hats that she insists on wearing to distinguish herself, more fitting for a Delta Sigma Theta luncheon in the spring.
Yeah, like the weird guy with head-to-toe tats who insists on showing up at the public park every weekend with the snake around his neck, the old guy who insists on wearing a tiny Speedo swimsuit at the beach -and not being foreign!- or, the older woman who insists on showing up at the beach in a two-piece swimsuit that more closely resembles dental floss, Wilson can't figure out a way to stand out for what she knows about a given area of public policy, or being able to explain complicated issues in ways that people understsnd.
Nobody has ever said that about her.
It's sad for her, of course, but saddest of all for us,her constituents.
As I reflected on what took place in the program later on Sunday afternoon, in between watching the Marlins game and snapping some photos up in Hollywood for a future blog post here, Wilson'sjuvenile performance just really continued to irritate me, since it was about as anti-intellectual an exercise as I've seen outside of the occasional segment of MSNBC'sHardball I've come across while flipping thru the channels during a commercial of something else.
If you're not really that familiar with the show, esp. if you are reading this overseas, the Republican Elephants in the bottom LEFT are a tip-off to MSNBC's avowed liberal ideology. Fortunately, not that many people watch the show, as more people watch The Cartoon Channel than MSNBC when Hardballis on.
When she successfully repeated a few simple talking points she remembered -the ones about the number of times the debt was raised during Reagan and Bush 41's presidencies, 18 and 7 respectively- I could almost picture her staff applauding, out-of relief. Really.
So what exactly were the things that she or her predecessors, Carrie Meek and Kendrick Meek proposed that would cut the federal budget and put the country on a more sustainable basis?
She never said despite having thirteen minutes to mention it.
Thirteen minutes that revealed her for the disconnected public official she is, who thinks the old solutions of Big Government spending their way out of a problem still works.
According to Local10'sBob Norman, with school scheduled to start up again on August 22nd, with at least 10 Broward County schools having been hit within the past month by thieves seeking to remove copper wiring that protects those schools from lightning strikes, and even while the robberies make the schools vulnerable to lightning damage, the Broward County School Board is once again acting true to form.
In this case, trying to keep the name of schools that now lack this protection from students, parents and taxpayers alike.
On Monday, Norman and his cameraman were chased off school property by Broward School officials while speaking to a contractor sent to fix the problem at one school.
Copper Thieves Targeting School Lightning Protectors, Thieves Have Targeted 10 Broward County Schools
It's true: Though the beleaguered Broward School Board will be hosting an FY 2011-12 budget hearing on Tuesday night, only one South Florida media outlet has had a story about their budget problems in the past few days.
Just saying...
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Broward Schools to consider budget calling for far fewer teachers, slightly lower tax rate
By Cara Fitzpatrick, Sun Sentinel, 6:18 p.m. EDT, August 1, 2011
Local10.com video: Sen. Marco Rubio speaks with Channel 10's Michael Putney on his Sunday morning TV show, This Week in South Florida, about the federal budget gimmicks currently in place, i.e. continuing resolutions http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iGaPvq16Zo
U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen speaks about Libya, new troubles between Israel and Palestine and the conviction of an aid worker in Cuba. Plus, what are the Miami-Dade County charter changes that will be on the May ballot?
Somewhat sheepish email I had to send out yesterday afternoon, as I'd originally planned on being up in Fort Lauderdale for the Commission vote:
February 2nd, 2010 12:45 p.m.
Just called up to Broward Govt. HQ before leaving to attend and film the public comments portion of the Broward County Commission meeting on financing of a proposed Broward Courthouse.
Good thing I made that phone call because they already voted this morning to approve it, 6-3, with Commissioners Gunzburger, Rodstrom and Wexler voting no.
P.S. Just checked JAABLOG before sending this. http://jaablog.jaablaw.com/ Good thing, too, as he's got more details! SURPRISE, SURPRISE! Posted by JAABLOG at 2/2/2010 12:50 PM The County Commission is building you a new courthouse! http://jaablog.jaablaw.com/2010/02/02/surprise-surprise.aspx#Comment
-----
Wednesday afternoon I wrote this:
Per the news below from Chicago's North Shore, since I lived in Evanston and Wilmette, and had lots of close friends at IUfrom New Trier, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Trier_High_School I'm thoroughly aware of the educational/aspirational mindset there, where the well-educated dual income parents are VERYinto the school, and the kids getting anything and everything that'll help them.
Listen to Trib reader Stu's simple logic and tell me it doesn't sound exactly like something that could be saidof the latest Broward Courthouse fiasco, when common economic sense fell by the way-side yesterday:
"If the board were to have done long range capital improvement planning,they could could have gone to the voters with an incremental plan, doingone facility or section every few years. Instead the board appears to have this very large and over reaching apetitewanting everything now."
All too predictably, the Broward County Commission chose to channel David Farragut at precisely the wrong time as they collectively voted "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead..."
Since my email yesterday, I added something to JAABLOG's excellent second commentary about the Broward Courthouse vote, which I've pasted at bottom. There's lots of insight and good info from other readers, too.
A $174 million building project at New Trier high school appears headed for defeat. The margin was about 63 percent against the project and 37 percent with 97 percent of the vote counted.
Officials called the building project at the Winnetka high school vital to bring the North Shore campus into the 21st century and correct lingering problems, such as having a third of the property inaccessible to disabled students.
But residents opposed to the project said in the weeks leading up to the vote that its scope was too vast, and the price tag too much of a burden in today's economy.
Under the plan, a cafeteria built in 1912 would have been demolished, as would a gym that dates to 1928, a tech arts building constructed in 1931, and a music hall built in 1950. New construction would have included a cafeteria, library, fieldhouse, gym, and 41 classrooms.
Here's what I wrote there, part of which I posted here on Monday:
First, some facts about Tuesday's vote on financing a new Broward County Courthouse, a story that only the Daily Business Review, JAABLOG and I wrote about. Not asking for plaudits, just noting it for historical context.
For those courthouse denizens who animate this blog with their constant contempt of Broward taxpayers thru your comments here, who think that a new Broward County Courthouse is very important, guess what?
The South Florida news media could hardly care less about you. You barely register on their horizon. You are insignificant.
In the days and weeks before the vote, the two daily South Florida newspapers and the four network TV stations sat on their hands and reported nothing about this issue.
Neither the Herald or the Sun-Sentinel have mentioned this subject in print or online since last September, when a Guest Op-Ed purported to have been written by Comm. Stacy Ritter was published in the Sun-Sentinel. Once again, on something very important, South Florida's news media has shown they were sleeping on the job, and let the people down.
Did you EVER see anything last year on TV about the ties that the members of the Lieberman-led Task Force had to the Broward legal establishment, who desperately want a brand new pony? Preferably, with a brand-new barn and a lifetime supply of feed. On the taxpayer's dime. Nope. There never was one,
Watching the coverage Tuesday night at 11 p.m., actually thinking there'd be some interviews -with somebody!- this point was drive home all over again.
At 11:16 p.m. CBS-4's Antonio Mora did a 15-second read without any visuals and said the vote happened "last night," which as we know, is incorrect. At 11:27 p.m., Local10's Laurie Jennings also did a 15-second read with archived visuals of yellow tape and leaking ceilings. There's the press coverage of your shiny new pony.
And why is it that so few usually well-informed people actually know how poorly Lieberman handled the rigged Task Force last year? I wrote last year on my blog how she and the county administrators didn't follow basic aspects of the state's Sunshine Laws, and instead, tried to fool the public by arranging for the agenda and assorted relevant public docs for the last meeting, which should've been online before the meeting, to be placed online HOURS AFTER the last meeting was already over.
Not that they actually had the final public meeting listed online days before the meeting, since they didn't.
Lieberman was the one in charge -the Chair. But the media didn't care -just like now.
Keep up the great work, JAABLOG!
While most of South Florida's media suffers from Super Bowl Swoon, JAABLOG keeps it real! Kudos!
Last night at the same exact time on their 11 o'clock newscasts, Channels 4 and 10, i.e. CBS4 andLocal10, each ran stories on women having surgery, plastic and laser.
Sadly for viewers with a public policy bent, these sorts of stories are the longstanding bread-and-butter of Miami TV stations, but are also part of the reason that so many Men aged 25-49 find it so easy to forgo the local newscasts at 11 p.m. and switch to ESPN's SportsCenter, because they know from experience that there will likely be at least one if not two dopey, chick-centric stories that center on women with some very serious self-worth problems and high-degree of shallowness.
That there are so many women like that living in South Florida is NOT exactly Breaking News, of course. What is is the number who honestly think that anyone else cares about their self-worth issues or their flabby arms or whatever.
Leave those private discussions to your family and friends, please. The rest of us just don't care, comprende?
Screenshot I took 10/5/09 of Local10's teaser during ABC-TV'sCastle.
Some free advice for the female reporters assigned to these stories that always center on somewhat vain and self-centered women with more money than sense, who are only too happy to have TV cameras follow them into their doctor's office.
The next time you get stuck on one of these stories, right before you close, look at the subjects and say: "You're not alone because of your looks, you'realone because of your superficial personality."
Think of it as your doing a good deed for the larger South Florida community. Because you are!
ABC-TV's Castle is one of my guilty TV pleasures. I'm happy to see that in its second season, airing opposite CSI Miami, the show really seems to be getting better and more nuanced, as the writers become more confident of what the characters would say or do in various circumstances. http://abc.go.com/shows/castle
For me, last night's episode, Inventing the Girl, was the best effort yet. It featured a great back-and forth volley between co-stars Susan Sullivan and Nathan Fillion sitting on the sofa of Rick's great apartment, perhaps the best-looking living room on TV.
At one point, after talking about her grudging acceptance of the fact that she'd been cast in a Broadway show as the grandmother and not as the fetching ingenue she once might've been, Rick throws her a lifeline by saying that she can now show "wisdom" on stage,
Martha suddenly pulls out from behind the couch this 8 x 10 b/w glossy of herself, below, which nearly caused me to jump off the couch from a severe case of déjà vu.
Screenshot I took 10/5/09 of Susan Sullivan during ABC-TV'sCastle. When I was living at Briscoe Quad my first two years at IU, I had a male friend who was a huge, huge fan of Susan Sullivan, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0838360/ who was then a star on CBS-TV's hit Falcon Crest. He had this same EXACT photo of her in hisdorm room! If I remember correctly, I think he'd seen her on Broadway before or something.
I mention this because of both the shock of seeing that photo I recognize pop-up on my TV screen completely out-of-the-blue, and also because my friend was probably one of a handful of persons I knew at IU who was hip to whatever was happening on Broadway, plus the scuttlebutt.
In his case, it was the result of his having parents who were ardent live theater fans who saw everything, no matter how obscure or Off-Off Broadway.
He knew what actor and actress had played what character in what show -or been anunderstudy- as a result of growing-up with a treasure trove of Playbills in his parents living room, arranged alphabetically within the year the show had opened.
I was so envious listening to him talk about it and the shows he'd seen, while I'd had to make do with cast albums.
(If blogging had existed back then, I have no doubt that his parents would've surely had one of the most popular and influential -and profitable- blogsor websites around on the subject ofBroadway, on-stage and off, includingfinancing, because they quite literally seemed to know everyone who was anyone.)
Listening to him describe their collection of souvenirs sounded a lot like me and my perfectly preserved collection of Dolphins, Hurricanes, Floridians, Gatos/Strikers/ Orioles game programs, going back to 1968, complete with used game tickets.
In a sense, my friend was sort of like the theater version of me, and my keen knowledge of American sports and sports trivia, that often swamped others who were older who thought they knew a thing or two. The benefit of having a very, very good memory.
FYI: In real life, Susan Sullivan is married to psychologist and author Dr. Connell Cowan, who co-authored with Dr. Melvyn Kinder, only two of THE best books I ever read, Women Men Love, Women Men Leave and Smart Women/Foolish Choices. I actually bought copies for friends when they came out in paperback.
To end this unexpected tangent on Broadway, The Jackson 5 from the early '80's performing "Corner of the Sky" from Pippin, a wonderful song from their Skywriter album,
Along with a host of other songs, my friends on the floor and I played this a lot on Saturday mornings and afternoons at IU on game days, with our stereo speakers propped up in the windows facing towards AssemblyHall and the football stadium, so fans downstairs on 17th Street walking over there for a game could get in the spirit of things.
Obamacare Death Panels have bad news for Newsweek: Doctors will pull the plug on mag at $75 a year; Newsweek R.I.P.
Well, it's not like we didn't get a well-informed head's-up from South Beach Hoosier favorite Michael Kinsleyabout fivemonths ago on what was to come from the magazine side of the Post-Newsweek family, of which Local10 (WPLG) is a blood-relative.
(I discussed the positive side of this family relationship in my March 31, 2007 post about my 1982 summer internship at Channel 10 that fell by the waysidebecause of some very silly and trulyanti-competitive rules at the IUTelecommunications Dept.) http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/hbs-national-moment-in-news-proves.html )
In case you already forgot or never ever heard about Kinsley's all-too-true LIVE autopsy on Newsweek and traditional news magazines in general, i.e The shot that was heard around... well, The Beltwayand certain media-centric zip codes in New York City, here it is:
The New Republic Backward Runs 'Newsweek'
Blah blah newsmag remake blah blah.
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/backward-runs-newsweek --------------------- Two takes on what Kinsley wrote:
New Yorkmagazine Daily Intel Michael Kinsley Attacks the New Newsweek, andWe Feel Bad About It May 22, 2009 http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2009/05/michael_kinsley_hates_the_new.html Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: Michael Kinsley, don’t be hating on Newsweek http://trueslant.com/lisacullen/2009/05/22/michael-kinsley-dont-be-hating-on-newsweek/ -------------- As toNewsweek Editor Jon Meacham? Very, very bright guy, obviously, but he seems almost blind to the factthat in the eyes of many, including other journalists I know in Washington and elsewhere whose names you'd recognize, he is, quite literally, the placeholder for all the journalism blandness that stretches from coast-to-coast.
The sort of too-clever-by-half editorial commentary -hello,Miami Herald- on illegal immigration that routinely takes place in news articles, and not just on the editorial page.
Supposed news articles where some basic journalistic questions are never asked or even hinted at, perhaps for fear of queering readers about what are undoubtedly intended by the editors to be sympathetic heart-wrenching stories about American-born kids of illegals.
Illegal aliens who routinely ignored court orders and ICE for years and finally got deported back to Colombia, El Salvador or fill-in-the-blank.
Meacham is also emblematic of the very high self-regard of many in the MSM, as well as their cozy relationshipswith powerful corporate elites, whom they are generally loathe to criticize by name, even while they joke together with the likes of a Jeff Immelt, GE's Chairman and CEO, about their latest appearance on The Charlie Rose Show at the afterparty at an Aspen Institute event or over in Davos, hanging out with Bono.. (I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said before in this regard, but whether in Davos for the World Economic Forum and chatting with Tom Friedman, or in New York for some Clinton GlobalInitiative meeting, any place where Queen Rania is, by default, almost always THE place to be! See http://www.queenrania.jo/ and http://www.style.com/vogue/feature/2009_March_Queen_Rania/ and http://www.youtube.com/QueenRania)
As Michael Kinsley coyly notes in his excellent New Republicessay:
In his editor's letter--one of many traditional newsmagazine features that have survived the scythe of change--Jon Meacham says, "We are not pretending to be your guide through the chaos of the Information Age," which concedes a lot of ground from the get-go. Why not at least pretend? Why else would people pick it up, let alone subscribe?
Later, he writes with disdain:
And so we progress to "Features," which seems to be longer articles on myriad subjects, many written by outsiders (Michael Bloomberg, Tina Brown…), who are prized because they bring an independent luster. Also, you don't have to give them health care. But the section's lead story is the magazine's cover story: an essay about and interview with President Obama by Meacham himself. This kind of thing was a staple of the old newsmagazine, and it follows strict rules. It always opens with an anecdote or telling detail that flaunts the magazine's access to the great, and illustrates whatever the point of the piece was supposed to be. Disappointingly, Meacham's reinvented Newsweek has not abandoned this stale formula.
Then comes a deft and well-delivered Kinsley punchto the jaw of D.C-dom.:
Another piece in the issue--I guess it's supposed to be a "reported narrative … grounded in original observation and freshly discovered fact"--is about curing autism. "It's spring in Washington," the piece begins, "and Ari Ne'eman, with his navy suit and leather briefcase on wheels, is in between his usual flurry of meetings." It's spring in Washington. That doesn't seem to qualify as either an "original observation" or a "freshly discovered fact." Nor does it have any apparent relevance to the story that follows. Could it be a "provocative (but not partisan) argument"? And what about that blue suit? I have news for Newsweek: Washington is the blue suit capital of the world. Let's give them the leather briefcase on wheels.
Killing with kindness!
The current purge of reporters across the country for bottom-line economic reasons is a particularly tough pill to swallow for many journalistsin D.C., New York and other hipper-than-thou urban hubs, particularlyamong those who were in J-School in the early to mid-90's, during the golden era of reporter as highly-paid and sought-after social commentator.
That's because they imagined that they'd be the natural inheritors of the self-aggrandizing corporate and college speaking tours of Cokie Roberts and her husband Steve Roberts, before and after their various books came out.
The culture which so aggravated longtime South Beach Hoosier favorite (and Asia expert) James Fallows when he tookover the reins at U.S. News & World Report, that he engaged in addition-by-subtraction by dumping Steve Robertsto show he was deadly serious about ending that kind of behavior at any magazine he was at. http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/
In fact, if you listen rather carefully when Jon Meacham is on a TV chat show, you might even say that it's apparent that Meacham has fallen under the spell of the sound of his own voice, pontificating thru 18th-century historical allusions, something that was never true of the late Robert Novak
It's my personal belief that we need more journos digging for facts and examples of hypocrisy in Washington and among the powerful, like Bob Novak, not more Jon Meachams drawing imprecise comparisons to matters little remembered by most Americans, as if he was channeling Shelby Foote's powerful and pithy anecdotes in Ken Burns' masterpiece, The Civil War.
Please leave the grandiloquent American historical allusions to George F. Will. He's already got it covered. In a media universe that actually made sense and reflected current and future economic and social realities, one of the things we'd have in this country is a weekly one-hour network TV program starring Fallows or Kinsley -or both.
They'd one-up Charles Kuralt, John Madden and the C-SPANBus by going on the road, interviewing and interacting with some of the dynamic people who are changing the face of our country with their thinking, acumen and boldness. Despite what Congress and the president say or do to screw with that effort.
A variation of this theme was tried with Tom's excellent foreign policy/economic specials a few years ago, on what was then called the Times-Discovery Channel but is now called ID: Investigation Discovery. http://investigation.discovery.com/
Below, Tom'sThe Other Side of Outsourcing
Hm-m-m... how about calling their series on business and technological innovation, The Road to Innovation. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. LOL!
That title has only been used a million times over the past 20 years, based on my last 1.001 trips to the Business section of Borders or Barnes & Noble.
Who are the leading thinkers, engineers and managers at Google, Microsoft, Intel or JPL, and what sorts of problems are they routinely running into in trying to continue their research and innovation? What sorts of things/solutions might be possible if those roadblocks didn't exist?
Who are the brilliant former NASA engineers and technicians who've been so thoroughly burned-out and exhausted by the myopic space policy in Washington of the past twenty years that they've left the Feds, Cape Canaveral and Houston in the rear-view mirror, and are now using their natural curiosity, enthusiasm, brains and network of smart, savvy friends, to create their own innovative companies?
Companies that will help make the country more economically competitive internationally, to get the country closer towards the sort of smart, adaptive and energy-efficient technology that made them decide to apply to grad school in the first place? Curiosity. The sort of firms that ought to be all over the place in Central Florida if Tallahassee was paying any kind of serious attention. (But do you really think such non-serious pols like Sansom, Geller, Gelber andCrist did any critical thinking along those lines? Could their collective neglect and failure to seize self-evident opportunities here be any more patently obvious?)
What's going on these days in a chastened Silicon Valley among the smart set who didn't put all their eggs in one basket? What areas are successful VCs putting their money into so they can put their money where their mouth and hearts are -and why?
Are so-called innovative Foundation-funded 'strategies' in local communities really producing practical and tangible results that will have staying power after the initial round of grants and media hoopla have run their course? Why or why not?
That leads to an important related question. Who are the decision-makers at the well-known national Foundations like Ford, MacArthur, Eli Lilly, et al, i.e., the groups that bankroll the only PBS programming that most Americans actually watch.
What are the common characteristics of successful applicants, whether individuals, government agencies, cities or counties? What do they do to prevent their personal or institutional biases and daily exposure to corporate cronyism from impeding their funding decisions?
Or from clouding the necessary empirical fact-finding that takes place afterwards to determine whether the grantee was successful or not?
Do they have a pronounced tendency to only give money to those groups or individuals who will produce most positive publicity for the Foundation versus those who actually need it the most?
And name some names the way that Sixty Minutes did in the mid-70's when it was earning its stripes, not doing fawning celeb profiles on over-exposed Tiger Woods. who bores me silly.
That the particular subjects I've just highlighted here are all ones that I'd also like to see in a smart weekly newsmagazine like Newsweek, but won't, is precisely the point. Buh-bye Newsweek.
----------------------- Washington Post Newsweek Changes Subscription Strategy
By Frank Ahrens Washington Post Staff Writer September 12, 2009
Money-losing Newsweek hopes to break even by 2011 and plans to as much as double its subscription rate over the next two years, the magazine's top executive said Friday.
Ann McDaniel, managing director of Newsweek, which is owned by The Washington Post Co., said the magazine will aim for a "smaller base of very committed subscribers and get more money from each of them," while speaking at The Post Co.'s annual shareholders meeting at the company's D.C. headquarters.
