"Fertile" territory for media bias! Or, that's why it's the Miami Herald -and is shedding longtime readers! Former Florida governor Jeb Bush makes some nonsensical comments on Friday morning in hopes of passing the amnesty-first immigration bill, but while MSM and blogosphere duly write about what he said and give it due attention, the Miami Herald wouldn't post the story and leave it visible on their website for hours -like they'd do if other pols had said same thing -like Rick Scott for instance

Above, what the Miami Herald's webpage looked like shortly before 11 p.m. Friday.

On a day when an embarrassing and nonsensical comment by former Florida governor Jeb Bush was one of the top political stories of the day as judged by the country's political class and blogosphere, guess which Florida newspaper has nothing about it on the front page of their website, even while continuing to carry a story at the top of their website about Brit boy band One Direction?

Yes, the Miami Herald.

Surprise!

More than 12 hours after The National Journal has posted their story using some informed tweets, 

Jeb Bush Says Immigrants Are 'More Fertile,' Twitter Gets Mad

By Ben Terris and Matt Berman

Updated: June 14, 2013 | 10:34 a.m. 

June 14, 2013 | 10:24 a.m

http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/jeb-bush-says-immigrants-are-more-fertile-twitter-gets-mad-20130614 

you literally couldn't find the story by examining what appears on the Herald's landing page.

Another example of the Florida news media running interference for the darling of the GOP East Coast Establishment and Florida's influential low-wage agribusiness industry, and a scenario that keen-eyed observers have seen time and again at the Herald the past ten years as its era of genuine relevancy in the community recedes farther and farther back in time and memory.

But then the Herald has long treated Jeb Bush differently than it does other pols in Florida -that is, once he finally got elected governor.

Typical media suck-ups.

By the way, who, exactly, is going to be persuaded to support this bill, S.744, because some self-serving and over-rated politician says that female immigrants are fertile?

That's a very, very weird thing to say aloud and makes you wonder what would have happened if some quick-witted reporter had asked him how he knew that.

I'd like to meet those people, or rather, I'd like the Florida news media to try to seriously try to find even one person in this state who is convinced by Bush's comment to change positions.

Just one person.

You couldn't find one, which makes Bush's comments even more asinine and queer.

This guy could NOT win an argument to save his life -or our country's..

If current Florida governor Rick Scott had said something along these lines, that story would've been the lead story on Friday night's six o'clock TV newscasts in Miami and be parked at the top of the Herald webpage for days on end, full of feigned outrage by liberals and La Raza about "the hurtful comments."

But yet again with Jeb Bush, someone I'd never vote for, and someone too weird, off-putting and self-serving for my tastes -to say nothing of his being very, very over-rated as a policy person- the Miami Herald gives him another hall pass.

Here's where the Herald buried the story

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/06/14/3451208/jeb-bush-america-will-decline.html

And if you're paying attention, you'll see that it was an AP reporter doing the story on the former Florida governor, not even one of the Times/Herald reporters or a McClatchy reporter in D.C.
Now that's embarrassing!

Déjà vu opinions from a new perch: National Journal's Beth Reinhard may've left the Miami Herald behind, but she STILL makes the same tired and unpersuasive arguments as before. You'll never guess who she writes will be the key to 2012 vote. Surprise -Hispanics! She's wrong -it's actually Catholics in the Midwest and PA

Déjà vu opinions from a new perch: National Journal's Beth Reinhard may've left the Miami Herald behind, but she STILL makes the same tired and unpersuasive arguments as before. You'll never guess who she writes will be the key to 2012 vote. Surprise -Hispanics! 

She's wrong -it's actually Catholics in the Midwest and PA

If you think that former Miami Herald political reporter and columnist Beth Reinhard can go even three sentences in this story WITHOUT mentioning the I-4 Puerto Rican voters that we've all been reading about for at least 18 months, you LOSE.

Lose, just like Herald readers did for so many years when they opened the paper and thought that if only out of randomness, perhaps that would be one of the few times in the year when they might see something original under her byline, and yet inevitably, what would follow was almost always the same banal and predictable words and "observations" about subjects that we'd all already seen.
Already seen and better-described and analyzed by other reporters and columnists MANY MONTHS before.

Yes, she even comes up with some of the predictable italicized names (for Hispanic food) to show that she's in touch.

Que Dios!

The National Journal

The Story of the Hispanic Vote Is the Story of the 2012 Campaign

Cuban-Americans aren’t the only Latinos candidates need to woo in Florida. Puerto Ricans also command attention.

By Beth Reinhard

Updated: November 1, 2012 | 9:39 p.m. 

November 1, 2012 | 2:00 p.m.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/the-story-of-the-hispanic-vote-is-the-story-of-the-2012-campaign-20121101?page=1

My favorite part?

Where after NOT explaining why Spanish-surnamed voters in the near-future will politically be more like Puerto Ricans than Cubans or Mexicans or Central Americans, and thereby curtail Cubans' relative power and favored role in Florida and the U.S., at the beginning of the fifth pargraph. 

Just saying it doesn't make it so.

There, she lays this gem on the table:

"Regardless of the outcome, the Hispanic vote will be one of the most important markers of the parties’ futures...'"

Sounds like backsliding and equivocating to me.

  

It's not for nothing that I once justifiably titled a blog post here -on September 3rd, 2010-
Addition by subtraction: Beth Reinhard leaving Miami Herald, heading to D.C. and The National Journal. Herald readers finally win one!, http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/addition-by-subtraction-beth-reinhard.html

What time zone is she in? And year?

More past posts that mentioned Reinhard are here:
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/search?q=reinhard

The only saving grace -and I do mean ONLY- is that Reinhard doesn't make the obligatory butt-kissing reference to some Univision TV personality flacking a book like Jorge Ramos, did in 2004, complete with grandiose and self-serving reference to the power of people with tildes in their last name, something that Reinhard surely would have seen fit to do if she were still at the Herald.

What's that?
You say that you don't you recall the name of the Ramos book from 2004?
It was "The Latino Wave: How Hispanics Will Choose the Next President"
Hmm... not so much.

But because he's one of their favorites, America's Mainstream Media just pretends that boast and the book behind it never existed, and it's like Ramos never got an at-bat and struck-out.

At One Herald Plaza, right on Biscayne Bay, there still seem to be far too many people, even in the year 2012, who haven't caught on to the fact that their constant sycophantic need to make Hispanic media or Hispanic-oriented advertising executives -especially the ones in Miami whom the Herald wants to sell advertising space to or partner with, with all its attendant log-rolling- the ones quoted so extensively and so over-the-top in articles about Spanish-language media the past few years, sound like young Jones Salks, instead of car salesmen or Hi-Fi salesmen of the mid-1970's that they are, reeks of desperation.

Would you like that new stereo with "Quad" sound, sir?

The people they've quoted so promiscuously were nothing more than salesmen trying to sell something -a product or service.

That's fine, but there's nothing lofty or high-minded about selling toilet paper and air freshener and cookie and beer, so stop acting like there is.

It's sales!
That's all it is.

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

Richard Mourdock for U.S. Senate campaign video: It's time.... for Richard Mourdock. March 3, 2011, http://youtu.be/0EE8jJ2Jhu8

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's  Greg 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.

Read the rest of the column at 

http://www.nationaljournal.com/columns/cook-report/lugar-s-downfall-20120510

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Breitbart.com 

LUGAR: 36 YEARS OF PUBLIC SERVICE

by Greg Garrison

May 16, 2012

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.  

Read the rest of the post at:

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/05/16/lugar-36-years-enough

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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 Quayle Senate debate at IU in 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.

Karma, it's not just a chameleon.

-----

Howey Politics Indiana: http://howeypolitics.com/

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

http://www.npr.org/2012/05/12/152561169/indiana-senate-race-the-bigger-picture

http://www.youtube.com/user/MourdockforSenate

Shouldn't actual "facts" matter to journalists even in their Tweets, or, is it every man for themself to get Followers? Just saying...

Below is a copy of a pithy email about last night's GOP presidential debate in South Carolina that I sent out to some media friends and acquaintances across the country last night.

Likely, during a timeout of a college football game I was watching.

That is, unless it was while I was watching Four Weddings and a Funeral for about the 50th time. 
What can I say, I've always been a Hugh Grant fan, and he's been in three of my favorite films, the aforementioned Four Weddings, Notting Hill, and Love Actually, all written by Richard Curtis, who directed the latter.

Coincidence? I don't think so.

My last post mentioning Hugh Grant was on September 28, 2010, in a post titled, Gloria Estefan climbs windows during Dolphins-Jets game, but Hugh Grant was The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. Winner: Grant!

http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/gloria-estefan-climbs-windows-during.html

(For some people, I sent a screen grab of the Twitter section in the right-hand column of the LA Times website, for others, I just copied and pasted. The latter seemed easier to post here so it'd be legible.)

It's self-explanatory:

-----

Just saw this on LA Times website.

If someone is a professional journalist, shouldn't facts matter even in your Tweets, or is it every man for themselves?

Really, tweeting about something you think you might have heard on a streaming event?

It was on TV to make it easy and accessible, so who's watching the streaming version?

L.A. Times politics staff on Twitter

jamesoliphant Hard to tell from feed: I believe Bachmann just said she would get rid of Medicare.24 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite

MaeveReston Watching#CBSNJDebate live stream is like listening to a constantly skipping record...31 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite

-----

Michele Bachmann sees bias in stray email

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-bachmann-bias-20111113,0,914104.story

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/

http://twitter.com/#!/jamesoliphant

http://twitter.com/#!/MaeveReston

http://www.latimes.com/about/twitter/

http://www.latimes.com/

The National Journal's Yochi Dreazen on the new garrison state of Washington, D.C.: “Walled Off Washington"

Commemorative plaque located by the Document Door in the United States Capitol
IN HONOR AND REMEMBRANCE OF THE HEROISM DISPLAYED BY OFFICER JACOB JOSEPH CHESTNUT AND DETECTIVE JOHN MICHAEL GIBSON UNITED STATES CAPITOL POLICE WHO, ON JULY 24, 1998, HERE BRAVELY GAVE THEIR LIVES DEFENDING THE UNITED STATES CAPITOL
DEDICATED BY THE HONORABLE J. DENNIS HASTERT, SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, AND THE HONORABLE STROM THURMOND, PRESIDENT PRO TEMPORE OF THE UNITED STATES SENATE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Capitol_shooting_incident_%281998%29

At the exact time of the 1998 incident above -near Tom Delay's office- I was over in the Rayburn Building across the street.


Former Wall Street Journal Military Correspondent Yochi Dreazen, now in his sixth month at The National Journal, http://nationaljournal.com/ has a good story on the philosophical and public policy debate on personal security among the official Washington set that's only gotten more hysterical following last week's shooting in Tucson, as that perpetual Inside the Beltway debate over ease-of-access to elected officials vs. adequate security safeguards, and the well-known arguments that underpin the two sides, are both re-evaluated.

-----

The National Journal
ANALYSIS
Walled-Off Washington

How free can a society be when its elected officials are kept further and further away from those they represent?
By Yochi J. Dreazen
Monday, January 10, 2011 | 2:55 p.m.
Updated at 3:07 p.m. on January 10.

It’s hard to remember, but Washington wasn’t always a city of walls.

Thomas Jefferson held a public reception at the White House after his second inaugural, and citizens were able to freely wander through the building to personally ask presidents like Abraham Lincoln for jobs and other favors. Harry Truman took long walks around Washington each morning protected by just a handful of Secret Service agents. Capitol Hill had no roadblocks or barricades, and cars and trucks passed directly in front of the White House as they drove down Pennsylvania Avenue, one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares.

Today, those seem like postcards from a forgotten era.

Read the rest of the story at: http://nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/washington-not-always-a-city-of-walls-20110110

Frankly, there are some people I can think of on Capitol Hill who have long believed that the public already had TOO MUCH access to them and their staffers, yet had no problem in meeting lobbyists in questionable public places where the security was lax to say the least, and where all kinds of things could happen if someone were so inclined.

I've personally seen questionable personal behavior at the area's three main airports among well-known elected and appointed officials -and the press- that was really over-the-top, and while perhaps not exactly TMZ-worthy, was NOT at all what the constituents back home, or even the top echelons of their Dept would want to see or know anything about.

Okay for South Florida, perhaps, but not among the professional institutional set.

Plus, there are SO MANY sieves in security up there, it's ridiculous.
Anyone who has worked there for any length of time can recite all sorts of specific places and circumstances where something could be done simply and quickly with few the wiser.

After 9/11, some effort was made to change some of these places, but others, well, not as much as you'd expect.

When you live just five blocks from the U.S. Capitol, as I did for a while my first year in Washington, you think about all sorts of things, and when you see the U.S. Capitol Police and The Supreme Court Police everyday, security and safety is on that list, especially when you are walking back at night, after work, from your daily walk over to The Washington Monument and back, listening to either talk radio or NPR.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_Police

I personally believe that elected representatives who have unreasonable fears should simply hire their own security at their own expense, not ours. If you don't like the working conditions, there's always somebody happy to take your job.
You are completely replaceable.

Many new congressmen and staffers come to town under the mistaken belief that The U.S. Capitol Police are like White House-detailed Secret Service agents and are ready to take a bullet for them. They're not!
http://www.uscapitolpolice.gov/home.php

Having gotten to know many of them over the years because I tended to go to the same floors in the same House and Senate building because of my job and interests, and there are only so many places to cross the street, I can tell you that, collectively, their worst fears were very stupid congressmen -or even stupider staffers- who put themselves in harms way by their foolish personal behavior and choices, and who seem to expect the Capital Police to extricate them.

Representatives who refuse to use prudent judgment or who continually cause problems become quickly known among the police force. Then they become quickly well-known to the media and the general public.

Former Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney is perhaps the most obvious example I can think of, and it bears mentioning here that even among the female cops, there's a belief that, for whatever reason, the female Reps are esp. reluctant to follow the simple rules that everyone else MUST follow.

Nobody cares that you used to be the mayor of Dog Patch, ran a Fortune 500 company or were formerly the House Minority Leader in dopey Florida.
You are a dime a dozen!

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,189553,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/washington/20brfs-010.html?_r=1&ref=cynthiaamckinney

Consider this: based on what we now know about the depth of his myriad problems with substance abuse and anger control, do you honestly think that Patrick Kennedy, now a former Congressman, never drove his car while not under control on the side-streets near the Capitol office buildings? Really?

http://www.wusa9.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=49033 http://www.uscapitolpolice.gov/pressreleases/2006/pr_05-05-06.php

The first thing I thought of when he was arrested was that he was very lucky that he never hit anyone at night, because a D.C. jury would have made an example out of him in a way that would simply not ever happen back in Rhode Island.

See also:
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/11/sen-leahy-sees-a-downside-to-more-security/

http://nationaljournal.com/