The show is Jeopardy! and the question is: "Can I have 'Midterms' for $2,000"

"Can I have 'Midterms' for $2,000"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvhOI7Z9oKU

Above, a video showing a side of American pop culture that you'd think the South Florida news media would've already shown over-and-over by now.

In any case, seeing it puts me in the mood to recall a thing or two I once wrote in 2009 about Marco Rubio, back when the South Florida news media had all but conceded the 2010 GOP U.S. Senate nomination to Charlie Crist.

But some of us could see that what was so appealing about him to us would also prove just as appealing with Florida voters, confounding the "experts" who discounted his talk about taking the Constitution seriously.

The excerpt below is from a June 22nd, 2009 email to a Hallandale Beach friend who'd first told me weeks before about the underdog Rubio's appearance that June night in Hallandale Beach, which took place before an overflow audience at the Hallandale Beach Cultural Center.

All of my photos below are from June 22, 2009, Hallandale Beach.



That's Anthony Man of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel at the table.

-----

As I said earlier, if I don't get that info from you tonight, I'll write the basics about his appearance at the HB Cultural Center Tuesday night, and try to post it before I go to sleep tonight.

I may(?) also post the clueless Beth Reinhard column from Saturday's Herald that was one of the worst of the many bad columns she's penned since I returned to South Florida:
http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/columnists/story/1105950.html
She's truly awful and bereft of either insight or originality.

But by embracing DeMint, Rubio risks moving too far to the right. DeMint advocates sending illegal immigrants back to their home countries and making English the official language of the United States, which could mean that Rubio's Spanish-speaking constituents would not be able to get ballots and other government documents in their first language.


I'm going to be picking that column apart soon on my blog, as it is full not only of intellectual laziness, but factual errors, not the least of which is the comments about the language of the ballots, since the DOJ has oversight over certain states because of the federal Voting Rights Act, and that includes Florida.
You know, where we live?

Plus, because South Florida's county officials have decided that it's good public policy that ballots also appear in Spanish (and Creole), and that is supported by the majority of the local populace, Reinhard's argument is a straw man.

A good reporter would already know that.
That Beth Reinhard doesn't, or acts like she doesn't, gives you some true sense of her profound political ignorance.
Not that this is exactly Breaking News to me.

See also the New York Times:
Justices Let Stand a Central Provision of Voting Rights Act
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/us/23scotus.html

Frankly, I almost always groan after reading something Reinhard's written.

In fact, it was after reading some nonsense she'd written about Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, while I was having breakfast with my father at Denny's, that I decided I needed to finally listen to my friends back in D.C., who'd been urging me for years to start a blog when I was still living there.

Right, when all my media and political connections were close-at-hand and would've proved very useful to me in sharing some very interesting stories, anecdotes and insight that I was either eyewitness to or privy to, that had heretofore remained the domain of party chatter among very close friends with a curiosity matching mine.

10:35 p.m.
Just got your new email with attendee info. Thanks!

Confirmed Speakers: RNC Secretary Sharon Day, Broward GOP Chairman Chip LaMarca, Marco Rubio Candidate for US Senate, Lt. Col. Allen West Candidate for US Congress, Joyce Kaufman 850 AM Radio Host, and a special video presentation from Michael Steele. Performing our National Anthem, National Vocalist Lou Galterio.

A day in the life of McClatchy's Miami Herald, as viewed by a reader who's largely given up on them fixing their problems, or surviving long-term

Above, November 12, 2010 photo by South Beach Hoosier of a Miami Herald vending machine on U.S.-1/S. Federal Highway in Hallandale Beach, Florida.

UPDATED 11/13/10

I guess I hardly need mention to anyone living in South Florida that the prices posted on this vending machine haven't been accurate for quite some time, but then the Miami Herald management's foolish insistence in the recent past that only charging Broward readers a quarter, while already charging fifty cents in Miami-Dade, would get them more readers and eyeballs on their ads, never made any sense either, though from a distance, it might've sounded good in theory.
Say from Sacramento, Calif., the home of McClatchy Company, which owns the Herald.

Even their own reporters and columnists knew this, as prior to their finally charging the same amount in both counties, it would've been rare for any phone conversation I had with a Herald reporter or columnist to end without them bringing the subject up, which told me in no uncertain terms that it was clearly a sore subject.

For the better part of the 14 years I lived in suburban Washington, D.C., in Arlington, VA, and caught the Metro train into downtown Washington for work during the week, whether from the Clarendon Metro station or the Ballston station, I happily paid fifty cents for the Baltimore Sun from a vending machine on my way down into the station -since the 1990's- while paying less for the Washington Post, because it was a very smart, well-written and well-edited newspaper.

The Sun, a newspaper I first read as a kid in North Miami Beach while growing-up a devout Orioles fan, is not what it once was, owing to a lot of curious moves made by parent Tribune Company, but on any given day, it's still usually much better than the Herald and the Tribune-owned Sun-Sentinel combined, and was well worth the price.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/

People in South Florida, especially serious people, will always be willing to pay more for quality, but they want to see it first.
That quality they seek is seldom if ever seen in the current version of the Miami Herald.

So what's the plan for the Herald's future, if any?

Exactly.

Back on September 18th, I emailed the following thoughts of mine, most of which were written while once again exasperated by what kind of product the Herald was producing.

I sent it to a couple of dozen or so of the usual well-informed, media-centric folks I know in Florida and around the country who get my observations before I usually share them here with you all later in the day, often after getting insightful comments, corrections or head's ups from them about related (or worse) MSM screw-ups closer to them geographically.

In light of what I wrote here on November 3rd about the Herald's truly dreadful coverage of the recent Giants-Rangers World Series, that is, their mentioning NOTHING about Game 2 the following day, on a Friday morning, while the South Florida edition of the New York Times, printed up in Deerfield Beach, 25 miles north of me, had a page-and-a-half of stories and columns, plus nice photos and box score info.

The Miami Herald's dismal Pony Express-style coverage of The World Series -compared to the New York Times- is a bad omen for readers
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/miami-heralds-dismal-pony-express-style.html

The following email is also in that vein, and all came together one particularly frustrating day about nine weeks ago, when I was checking the Herald's website for some information and noticed something quite troubling, which was not good news for either Herald readers or serious-minded people in South Florida who continue to ponder this simple question:
What's going on at One Herald Plaza?

-----

The Miami Herald's staff finally smells the coffee.
But is it too late?

Back on Sept. 1st, I sent an email to Edward Schumacher-Matos, the Herald's Ombudsman (the one without either a blog or a weekly column, but rather some once-in-a-while thing) because that was the day where an armed intrusion took place at the Discovery Channel HQ in suburban D.C. -a Maryland building I've been in dozens of times- yet it took the Herald hours to put something about it online.

This, even while a nice but not great photo of actress January Jones of Mad Men fame remained online just below the masthead for hours, while nothing about the story up in Silver Spring, being shown on LIVE TV for hours on the cablenets, was there.

It was just the latest in a VERY long line of jaw-dropping and galling editorial and content decisions at the Herald in the recent past that befuddle the Herald's dwindling number of readers.

In fact, I was so dismayed that I actually wrote Hallandale Beach Blog fave, Alan D. Mutter, creator of Reflections of a Newsosaur blog fame, and mentioned here often,
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/ and asked him -only half-jokingly- if there was any chance that one of his savvy Venture Capital friends in Silicon Valley might want to reinvent themselves, and play the role of a media mogul, and perhaps take the Herald off of McClatchy's hands?

I even told him, "Trust me, the concerned and conscientious people in South Florida would've be very much indebted!"

Sadly, Alan replied that he didn't know of such a person.
But then I presumed that such a person even exists, oui?

-----

Date: Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 4:52 PM

Subject: Surprise! Takes over THREE HOURS for Herald website to mention hostage drama at Discovery Channel HQ in Silver Spring. Sleeping on the job, Just like Herald's Broward coverage!

To: Edward Schumacher-Matos

September 1st, 2010
4 pm

Dear Mr. Schumacher-Matos:

Nothing in this email is about the Herald's spotty coverage of Broward County in general or Hallandale Beach, and to a less degree, of Hollywood, in particular.
The paper's unsatisfactory coverage of them is what is is.
Reality.

Did you know that there are media sites overseas that have had something about this hostage story for a while now, yet the Herald has nothing almost three hours later but STILL has prime space at the top for

Kardashians

New fashion collection

They're cute girls and all and I get their appeal, but why has the paper completely
OD'd on them?
Seriously..

You should have one of the Herald's interns check and see how many times in the past six months there hasn't been something about them in the Herald.

Or how many times, since she was hired two years ago, Myriam Marquez has written anything at all about something going on in Broward County or of particular interest to readers there.

Trust me, it won't be pretty.
In fact, it will be grim.

Consider that your Sunday public policy section, Issues & Ideas, did not have the word "Broward" in it anywhere.
Or any story or column about some issue, personality or idea of particular relevance in Broward
Again.
For at least the second week in a row.

Do you know how many times THAT fact pattern has been true this year?
I did, I really did, but I stopped counting because it was so disturbing.
And pathetic.

The other day, in reference to the glacial and practically non-existent coverage of the Broward School Board races last Tuesday, and their lack of updates online, I compared the Herald's pace to the Pony Express on my blog.
In retrospect, I might've been exaggerating, but not quite in the way you might imagine.

In a day or so, I'm going to show that a careful analysis of Herald stories since last year's approval of the Marlins Stadium by the M-D County Commission, 5 of the 9 commissioners who approved it never had a story written about them in the ensuing 14 months that ever said anything at all about them and their vote on the stadium's financing, or any possible second-guessing or doubts from constituents.
ZERO.

That explains a lot.
Like why the paper was beaten soundly by a website on the stadium financing story due to a leak.

If someone with that info had tried to give the info to the Herald, unless they immediately got savvy reporters Matthew Haggman and Charles Rabin on the phone, unlikely, do you know what the Herald reporters and editors would've said or done?
Nothing.

The same response that Herald readers in South Florida routinely get from reporters and editors, like Beth Reinhard, Jay Ducassi and dozens of others when they contact them.

Those Herald employees first response is to call other people rather than call you back or return your emails about solid news you know or possess, even when you have photos that corroborate everything you say.

I know this first-hand and so do many other people I know who closely follow what goes on in Broward County and South Florida.

And guess what, the Herald daily shows that lack of context or understanding of the area they purport to cover, which is why so many readers constantly complain that the Herald's local news and govt. stories have an unusually high degree of fact and context problems, and are usually more notable for what is left out, often the most important aspect of why something happened -or didn't.

But unless you are there in person, like I am so often, you wouldn't know anything about it.

Seriously, when are we going to see the positive changes the Herald needs to make it viable and engaged?
What's the plan?

Not the silly one that got in print a few months ago, but a real plan that actually benefits readers who want real news?

The Herald's current plan of ignoring news because it's not in Coral Gables, Doral, Miami or Miami Beach is NOT working and is repelling readers from both the physical paper and the website, for reasons like why I wrote this in the first place: sleeping on the job!

From my perspective, the ship is still listing and there are NO ships around to rescue any survivors, if any.

I will leave to another day the confounding situation with reporter Alfonso Chardy and why his disingenuous professional behavior is allowed to continue apace, like nobody really noticed what he did a few weeks ago, blatantly lying to Herald readers in a news story.
But notice we did.

Not just me, but full-time print and TV reporters from around the state.
I know that because they contacted me to tell me they noticed, too.
And those are facts.

(About an hour later, after some website magic happened, I added.)

P.S. Congrats! It only took over three hours and continuous coverage on the TV cablenets for someone at the Herald to finally post something online. I can only imagine how things will be in the future when some blogger scoops the Herald that Fidel Castro is dead.

------

Well, as you might imagine, despite having exchanged cordial emails with him in the past, I never heard back from the Ombudsman, whose email address I have since deleted from my computer, since really, what's the point?

If the Herald's current and recent management care so little about their own readers that Schumacher-Matos lacks the tools or frequency he needs to be taken seriously by Herald readers, the sorts of things other large newspapers provide -and the facts clearly show they do- why continue to kid myself and think my emails to him will accomplish anything other than temporarily venting some of my dismay?

Which is why many of the past emails I've penned to him over the years but never actually sent, keeping in DRAFT instead, will be now be revisited here on the blog when similar situations occur in the future at the newspaper, as they inevitably will, since the Herald keeps making the same mistakes over-and-over.
They won't stop digging the hole they're in.

To use an image that I've often used here in the past, their behavior is akin to a dog chasing-its- tail -initially amusing, but ultimately, fruitless and irritating.
Like many current network TV programs.

I forgot to mention above in my prologue that in my second email to my media-centric pals, friends and acquaintances here in Florida and around the country, I also sent them a link to Bob Norman's spot-on Daily Pulp post of Sept. 17th about the greatly rising frustration level of the Herald's own employees.

It's so good, I have it here and urge you to read the entire thing, including the reader comments, whose frustration with the newspaper and its management is clear .

BrowardPalmBeach NewTimes
Herald Reporters to Management: Stop Mimicking Twitter and Focus on Serious Journalism

By Bob Norman
Friday, September 17 2010 @ 5:57PM

The following letter appeared yesterday on the Miami Herald's internal memo board, Readme. Signed by numerous veteran reporters and editors, it was posted the same day 49 more layoffs were announced at the depleted newspaper.

-----------

Sept 2010
OUR HOPES FOR A BETTER HERALD:

So, it's Saturday night, and you want to hear live music. Among your choices: going to the Hard Rock Cafe to hear Shakira (or Seal or Ringo Starr or Reba McIntyre); or going to a bar with an open mike. At the Hard Rock, you'll hear a polished, professional artist.
At open mike night, you'll probably hear people with day jobs singing Sweet Caroline ... perhaps lustily, probably off key.

Nothing intrinsically wrong with that open mike bar. But we'll bet most people, with
the ability to choose, would go hear the pro.

The Miami Herald, we would argue, is becoming the newspaper equivalent of open mike night. Or a flea market.

Read the rest of the post at:
http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/2010/09/miami_herald_reporters.php

There are 177 reader comments!

See also McClatchy Watch on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/McClatchyWatch

McClatchy Watch website, while defunct since before last Christmas, is still online:
http://cancelthebee.blogspot.com/

Hallandale Beach Blog endorses Beth Reinhard & Charlie Crist's departure - asks they get escort to airport so they don't miss their flights out of FL

I've been sitting on this for months just waiting for Election Day to get here.

Below is an excerpt of an email that I wrote back on January 23rd, 2010 and sent out to a few dozen people following the election of Republican Scott Brown to the Massachusetts Senate seat held for 47 years by Ted Kennedy.
(And when was the last time you saw the media talk about him? It's like he died. Or, alternatively, booked a flight on Oceanic Flight 815.)

Most of you know who come here regularly know where I stand on the subject of Dan Gelber, as well as his his pack of supporters, which includes some of the most anti-democratic and unethical pols in Broward County.
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/search?q=%22Dan+Gelber%22

He's far too ambitious for his own good and doesn't have a record of being honest with voters.

He will lose the FL AG race to Pam Bondi, whom I will be voting for, as I think she'll set many media hearts aflutter as she tries to improve on Bill McCollum's decent track record and fight Obamacare.

Pam Bondi - "About Me"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5LbUFAJn6o

Organized Crime at It's Worst

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vds3WkKOrAw

Obviously, this was written before we all got the good news that Beth Reinhard would be leaving the Herald and heading to Washington and The National Journal.

My worst fear is that her column will be replaced by -dare I say it- Patricia Mazzei.
I will be devoting an entire post on Mazzei soon that zeroes in on some particularly irksome articles of her's that all shared the same weakness, regardless of subject matter.

Once you notice it, trust me, it's hard to ignore when you see her articles.
You'll find yourself actively looking for it.

Sort of like the way that once I knew that Campbell Brown had a certain facial tic when she was on-air, reporting the news, it was hard not to watch her and just wait for it.

-----

Just a note to let you know that per some of my hints of late, I already had a ton of things I'd already written that were going to be posted on my blog tomorrow. Subjects include: ...the Dan Gelber vs. Dave Aronberg race for AG, and Scott Brown's remarkable triumph, plus a couple of anti-Beth Reinhard pieces, exposing her infamous shallowness when it reached new jaw-dropping lows lately.
(Seriously, five sentences about the race to replace Meek?)

But then I read this article below this morning, after which I'm apoplectic, and now, I may have to re-schedule some things just to keep my head from exploding. How does the chief political reporter for the largest paper in the state NOT mention in a story ostensibly about insiders vs. outsiders, that Gelber's father was/is a longtime judge, someone who knew everyone who was ANYONE in Miami-Dade even BEFORE he was a judge?

I even knew who his father was when I was a kid in the 1970's -it's beyond incredulous! http://www.miamidade.gov/ethics/members.asp

Of course, rather than do like Gelber did, and work for his dad, the judge, one summer... or, as the Boston Globe put it:

At the end of his junior year at Tufts University, Scott P. Brown did not take a typical summer job like many of his classmates. Instead, he spent two months in Army basic training at Fort Dix, N.J., after joining the Massachusetts National Guard.

I've now read ALL the Boston Globe stories on Brown for the past few weeks and am even more impressed with him than before.

I will be sharing some of what I learned about him in some of those posts, though they may be after Sunday now just because I'm so tired of writing. By the way, here from Thursday is the best thing written on Scott Brown thus far, featuring some great investigatory sleuthing by the New York Times to connect-the-dots:

G.O.P. Used Energy and Stealth to Win Seat
January 20, 2010

This article is by Adam Nagourney, Jeff Zeleny, Kate Zernike and Michael Cooper.

BOSTON — The e-mail message from a Massachusetts supporter to one of the leaders of the Tea Party movement arrived in early December. The state was holding a special election to fill the seat held by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, it said, and conditions were ripe for a conservative ambush: an Election Day in the dead of winter with the turnout certain to be low.

“To be honest, we kind of looked at it and said, this is a long shot,” said Brendan Steinhauser, the director of state campaigns for FreedomWorks, which has become an umbrella for Tea Party groups. But the group was impressed by the determination of organizers in this decidedly Democratic state and was intrigued by the notion that this could be a way to effectively derail federal health care legislation.

Read the rest of the article at
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/us/politics/21reconstruct.html

This is the single best-written article I've read on any subject the entire year.

In the hard copy of this, they even have a chart showing the number of events Brown and Martha Coakley attended the past few weeks, and as you may already know by now, he outworked her 3:1.
Truth be told, some of those Globe stories appear brilliant in retrospect.

-------
Miami Herald
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/columnists/beth-reinhard/story/1440999.html

Florida's top candidates for U.S. Senate hardly political outsiders

By Beth Reinhard

January 23, 2010

Out of the cascade of commentary about Tuesday's upset by a Republican in Democrat-rich Massachusetts came this gem from state Sen. Dan Gelber of Miami Beach, who used to shoot hoops with the U.S. senator-elect in college:

"To the legions of Republicans in Florida who are claiming the 'I'm Scott Brown mantle,' let me say this: 'I know Scott Brown, Scott Brown was a friend of mine . . . you're no Scott Brown.' ''

The riff on the famous slap at Republican Dan Quayle after he compared himself to Jack Kennedy during the 1988 vice presidential debate was spot on. The leading candidates for Florida's open U.S. Senate seat -- Gov. Charlie Crist, Marco Rubio and U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek -- are all career politicians who commit sins of omission when they distance themselves from the establishment.

QUITE A LEAP

The governor is the biggest insider of them all. Crist compared Brown's avowed commitment to "the people's seat'' in Massachusetts to his own claim to be the "people's governor'' of Florida. It's quite a leap for the sitting governor of the nation's fourth largest state, a vice presidential shortlister, and the once-presumed Republican nominee to claim kinship with a truck-driving state senator who faced a double-digit deficit in the polls. (Do they even let pickups onto Fisher Island, where Crist's wife owns a $3.2 million manse?)

Crist's scorn for "the radical Obama-Reid-Pelosi agenda'' when he congratulated Brown also rang hollow since the economic stimulus package he supported sits at the very top of that agenda. Crist pointed out that he had spoken to Brown after his victory, as if sound waves made them soul mates.

While Rubio is certainly the underdog in the GOP race, the former speaker of the Florida House and a six-figures-earning lawyer is no political outsider either. In the last 11 years, Rubio was out of public office for only the last one -- a part of his resume he frequently skips over in his stump speech. Can he honestly lay the blame for the recession at the feet of Crist and President Barack Obama and claim to have had nothing to do with it?

Rubio has to stretch pretty far to the left to put his arm around Brown, who backs abortion rights and the state health insurance program in Massachusetts. Rubio touted his participation Friday in the "Virtual March for Life'' on the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Earlier this week, he backed Attorney General Bill McCollum's claim that the pending healthcare legislation is unconstitutional because it requires people to buy insurance. Like in Massachusetts.

PART OF THE MAJORITY

As for Meek, he does have one thing in common with Brown: Political analysts expect him to lose the general election. But while Brown was competing against the Kennedy dynasty in Massachusetts, Meek practically inherited his seat in Congress from his mother, Carrie Meek. She staved off potential rivals by waiting until the last minute to rule out another term.

That part of his bio didn't come up when campaign manager Abe Dyk said: "Having worked as a skycap for tips, as a Florida State trooper and having led the Coalition to Reduce Class Size, Kendrick Meek is the candidate best positioned to deliver that change as a U.S. senator.''

Ahem. Meek is part of the Democratic majority who sits on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. He has roots in Liberty City but has long roamed the halls of Washington and Tallahassee. The closest he ever got to a nude Cosmo centerfold like Brown? A mention in a celebrity blog called "Young Black & Fabulous.''

Beth Reinhard is the political writer for The Miami Herald.

-----

http://www.pambondi.com/home/

Hallandale Beach's pro-reform citizens ask FL Sen. George LeMieux to do a good turn and help end the 'culture of corruption' here: Call Victor Tobin!

Above, Miami Herald headline, November 26, 2009, page 3B:
Sen. LeMieux decries 'culture of corruption' in S. Florida

Oh Senator LeMieux, if you only knew the half of it in the City of Hallandale Beach!

Before your term is up, can you please do your constituents here a favor and call Judge Victor Tobin and tell him and his state-wide grand jury that like Norma Desmond at the end of Sunset Boulevard, Hallandale Beach is ready for its close up?

The concerned citizens of this beleaguered community are eager to talk to them and tell what they know.

Or as we say in the world of crime-fighting screenwriters everywhere, "drop a dime."

Sunset Boulevard (1950) -Final Scene, with Gloria Swanson as "Norma Desmond" descending the stairwell



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA9lFsiut2Q

Miami Herald
http://www.miamiherald.com/2009/11/25/v-fullstory/1350672_sen-lemieux-decries-culture-of.html

November 26, 2009

Sen. LeMieux decries `culture of corruption' in South Florida

By Marc Caputo and Beth Reinhard
Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau

A slew of South Florida political scandals have uncovered "a culture of corruption'' that must be stamped out, freshman Florida Sen. George LeMieux said Tuesday.

"I feel bad about my home town. This is another black eye on Fort Lauderdale,'' LeMieux said in response to a reporter's questions about accused Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein.

In the past decade, Rothstein -- a Broward lawyer who allegedly bilked investors over bogus legal settlements -- helped steer about $2 million in campaign contributions to political causes, committees and candidates, including Gov. Charlie Crist.

Rothstein's troubles surfaced after federal indictments this fall of other Broward figures: fundraiser Dr. Alan Mendelsohn, Broward County Commissioner Josephus Eggelletion, Broward School Board member Beverly Gallagher and former Miramar commissioner Fitzroy Salesman.

"We've got a culture of corruption in Southeast Florida. And we need to do something about it,'' LeMieux said. "It makes us look bad. It's bad for business and bad for our way of life.''

Crist appointed LeMieux, his former chief of staff, to the Senate seat for which the governor is now a candidate in an increasingly competitive Republican primary. Rothstein attended LeMieux's swearing-in ceremony in September.

While lawyers in Broward's legal community whispered about Rothstein's source of seemingly inexhaustible funds, politicians and charities tooks loads of his money.

"You don't look at someone who's generous and just criticize,'' said LeMieux, who also ran Crist's governor's campaign before taking the job with Crist. LeMieux then joined a law firm until he was appointed to the Senate.

LeMieux acknowledged he "didn't understand how he [Rothstein] made all his money.''

All of Crist's chiefs of staff have hailed from Broward: LeMieux, current campaign manager Eric Eikenberg and current chief Shane Strum.

Crist has downplayed his relationship with Rothstein, though each attended the other's wedding reception. Crist appointed Rothstein to a judicial nominating panel in Broward prior to removing him from the post Tuesday.

Crist has called for a statewide grand jury to examine political corruption. LeMieux supports the effort.

Marc Caputo can be reached at mcaputo@MiamiHerald.com

Reader comments, in chron order, are at
http://www.miamiherald.com/2009/11/25/v-fullstory/1350672_sen-lemieux-decries-culture-of.html?commentSort=TimeStampAscending&pageNum=1

How Jennifer Carroll proves the political history of Florida isn't quite what it used to be -and neither are the news media's memories, either

To the blog readers who were kind enough to email me and ask -perhaps tongue in cheek- if I noticed that "Correction" in the Miami Herald on Friday, I did.
Actually, I noticed the mistake in the original article on Thursday, below.

-----
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/09/02/1803901/scotts-likely-no-2-navy-vet.html

Miami Herald
Rick Scott's likely No. 2: Navy vet
A Republican victory in November in the governor's race could produce Florida's first black lieutenant governor. Jennifer Carroll is likely to be Rick Scott's running mate

By Steve Bousquet, Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau

September 2, 2010

Rick Scott's running mate on the Republican ticket for governor is expected to be state Rep. Jennifer Carroll, a U.S. Navy veteran and mother of three who, if elected, would be Florida's first black lieutenant governor.

Scott will unveil his pick Thursday in a campaign fly-around beginning in Jacksonville, a major hub of Republican voters near Carroll's home in Fleming Island.

In choosing Carroll, Scott, himself a Navy veteran, would get a woman with a distinctive personal story who could neutralize the gender appeal of his Democratic opponent, Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink:

• In a state where one in every seven voters is black -- and nearly all are Democrats -- Carroll is a black Republican.

• As a native of Trinidad, Carroll is an immigrant who could help soften Scott's hard-line image on an issue that cuts both ways in a state with a large immigrant population.

• She packs a celebrity punch: Her son, Nolan II, is a rookie cornerback and kick returner for the Miami Dolphins, drafted out of the University of Maryland.

"She's an immigrant and she worked her way up and she did everything through hard work. That's very similar to Rick's background. There's a lot of similarities between the two of them,'' said Jen Baker, Scott's campaign spokesman.

Carroll, 51, made Gov. Charlie Crist's short list of possible running mates in 2006, and she was among those listed as possible successors to Mel Martinez, who resigned his U.S. Senate seat last year.

Scott's camp is aggressive in challenging what it considers off-base speculation on political blogs. When blogs named Carroll as his pick Wednesday, the campaign raised no objection.

Lieutenant governors in Florida share one common trait: obscurity. The office did not exist before 1968 and it is unique in that no job description for it exists in state law.

Strategists agree that the selection of a running mate is largely a media fixation that matters little to rank-and-file voters, unless the choice backfires.

"The first rule of a lieutenant governor candidate is to not get in trouble,'' said GOP strategist and lobbyist J.M. ``Mac'' Stipanovich. "As a candidate for governor your choice of a lieutenant governor does little for you, but this one is intriguing.''

'A GREAT MESH'

Leslie Dougher, county GOP chairwoman in Carroll's home of Clay County, praised the choice as "far-reaching.''

"It would be a great mesh,'' Dougher said. "Mr. Scott is from South Florida and Jennifer is from North Florida.''

Sink's running mate is Rod Smith, 60, a former state senator and elected state attorney from Alachua County who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2006.

"I don't have time to speculate, really,'' Sink said in Miami Wednesday. ``I'm just waiting to see what his announcement is.''

BACKGROUND

Carroll moved to Florida in 1986. She and her husband, Nolan, have three children.

She became the first black Republican woman elected to the Legislature in a special election in 2003.

She retired after 20 years in the Navy, where she rose to the rank of lieutenant commander aviation maintenance officer.

She has a bachelor's degree from the University of New Mexico and a master's degree in business administration from St. Leo University in Pasco County.

Her official legislative biography notes that she is a life member of both the NAACP and the National Rifle Association.

Her record is not free of blemishes, however.

Six years ago, after news reports that she listed a degree from an online ``diploma mill,'' Kensington University in California, she dropped the reference from her official resume.

"This causes me great concern,'' Carroll told the Florida Times-Union in 2004. ``It's a lot of time, effort and money poured into a university I thought was a viable program.''

Last spring, Carroll filed a bill regulating certain electronic sweepstakes games. The Times-Union reported that Carroll confirmed that her public relations firm, 3 N. and J.C. Corp., represented Allied Veterans of the World Inc., a veterans' group that sought to legalize the slot-like machines.

Carroll quickly withdrew the bill (HB 1185) and said a staff member filed the legislation without her approval.

Carroll does not have a distinguished record as a lawmaker, but has compiled a solidly pro-business voting record and was unchallenged in a bid for a fourth term this fall.

At a campaign stop in Jacksonville on Tuesday, Scott told WOKV radio he had ``pretty much'' made up his mind but would not stoke speculation about his choice.

"This person's going to do a wonderful job,'' Scott said. ``Whoever it's going to be, you guys will all be proud of.''

Carroll would not be the first black woman to run for the state's No. 2 post.

In 1978, Claude Kirk, a former Republican governor seeking a comeback as a Democrat, chose Mary Singleton as his running mate, but the Kirk-Singleton ticket fared poorly.

Times/Herald staff writer John Frank and Miami Herald staff writer Beth Reinhard contributed to this report.

-----

The case of the missing adjective.

excerpted from:
Miami Herald
Corrections

September 3, 2010

In a story Thursday on Page 1B about Republican Rick Scott's selection of Jennifer Carroll as his running mate, it incorrectly noted that she was the first black female elected to the state Legislature.
Gwen Sawyer Cherry, a Democrat from Miami, was the first African American woman ever to serve in the Legislature. She was elected in 1970.

-----

Carroll is the first Black female Republican elected to the State House, which is why I highlighted Republican in red in the original since it wasn't there, but added online after the edition went to print.

Hmm-m-m... Gwen Cherry was also the first Black woman to practice law in Dade County, a not insignificant fact. See: http://www.gscbwla.org/cherry.htm

Obviously, I'm long past believing that all the employee cuts at the Herald are starting to have their logical negative results for their dwindling number of readers, in that they have lost people who actually know which facts are important and which are not, and can say something
when words in an article are flat-out wrong -or missing.

It will come as no surprise to most of you readers who come here often that in my opinion, the reporters in this community who don't know anything about the political history of this area or why things are the way they are, greatly out-number the ones who do.

This Thursday article is a preview of the future of South Florida media, something I notice nearly every time Miami TV reporters show up at Hollywood City Commission meetings and seem to know nothing -or next-to-nothing- about what is on the meeting agenda and what its implications might be.
So many are strangely incurious.

I don't expect them to be experts, but... well, let's just say that the amount of time some of them need to be talked to by the city's official spokesperson Raelin Story -who is always professional and accommodating- seems to be increasing, based on what I observe.
I'm sure she notices who does their homework and is prepared, and who doesn't and isn't.
I know I do.


Jennifer Carroll's web page at the Florida House of Representatives website:
http://www.myfloridahouse.gov/SEctions/Representatives/details.aspx?MemberId=4331&SessionId=42

Campaign website: http://www.scottcarrollforflorida.com/

For more on her talented son...

Miami Herald

DOLPHINS
CB Carroll embraces discipline

By David J. Neal

May 5, 2010

Here's how you know Dolphins rookie cornerback Nolan Carroll didn't grow up acting foolish, or at least didn't do so twice: he's the son of a former Navy lieutenant commander who retired after 20 years with some medals, including an "expert pistol medal."

And that was Mom, state Rep. Jennifer Carroll, the first female black Republican state representative. Dad, Nolan Carroll Sr., was an Air Force senior master sergeant.

"Ever since I came out of my mom, it was, 'yes, sir,' 'no, sir,' 'yes, ma'am,' be on time, do this, do that when I say so," said Carroll, a fifth-round draft pick. "Up to now, and I'm 23 years old, I still say, 'yes, sir,' 'no, sir.' They expect me to say it. There was very strict discipline in my house. They were also cool. They weren't always telling me what to do. They treated me like I was a grown man, as well.'

Now, Carroll is a grown man out of the Jacksonville area with an exemplary off-the-field makeup. If not for the broken leg that aborted Carroll's senior season at Maryland after two games, NFL coaches wouldn't have been in favor of drafting him, but rather adopting him.

"When you talk with the young man, he's just an impressive guy; he really is," Dolphins coach Tony Sparano said. "The first time I ever met him, I was really impressed with the way he came off. Never mind how he presented himself from a football standpoint, but he had all the other things that are important to us, too."

Such as a willingness to do exactly what he is told.

"The coaches are like my parents," Carroll said. "Same thing. I do what they tell me to do. I don't back talk."

And if he disagrees with a coaching decree?

"I look down and think, 'They know what's best for me, so I'm just going to listen to what they tell me to do,' " he said.

That's one reason Carroll tries to avoid even minor violations such as breaking curfew -- he figures rules were made for a reason. Also, he's used to being in situations where any bad behavior can reflect on others.

"If my friends wanted to go and do something and I thought it was bad, I wouldn't do it," he said. "I'd stay in the house just to make sure. I didn't want to give [his mother] a bad name.

"Same with this," he continued, looking past reporters to the Dolphins' logo facing the Davie practice fields. "I treat this like a family. I treat the Miami Dolphins like it's my mom, it's my family. I don't ever want to give them a bad name."

Now, if he can play nickel cornerback without embarrassing them on the field, he might have a job.

The Dolphins believe they have found their future outside cornerbacks in 2009 rookies Sean Smith and Vontae Davis. Will Allen, who turns 32 in August with nine seasons of mileage, will be back in that competition for starting spots this year after recovering from a season-ending knee injury. But for how long? Also, the Dolphins released last year's nickel cornerback, Nate Jones.

With three-wide receiver sets becoming the norm, it's a position defenses want settled.

"One of the things that I think I want to try to do with Nolan right away is to just get him in a position where he's going to be able to get himself settled down and play because he has missed so much time," Sparano said. "I think that we are going to kind of let him get his feet set at corner right now and then take a look at some of the players that we have in there and then worry about whether we get him inside."

Carroll, who ran a 4.42-second 40-yard dash at Maryland's pro day, played against slot receivers during his sophomore season in 2007. That was his first at cornerback after spending his freshman year as a wide receiver.

"[The Dolphins] like that I'm tough and aggressive," Carroll said "I need to work just getting used to the position some more. I've only been playing it a year and a half if you don't count my senior year that I missed."

Addition by subtraction: Beth Reinhard leaving Miami Herald, heading to D.C. and The National Journal. Herald readers finally win one!

Per Miami Herald Losing Chief Political Reporter Beth Reinhard To National Journal
Miami NewTimes By Tim Elfrink,
Thursday, September 2 2010 @ 1:39PM
http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2010/09/herald_losing_chief_political.php

It's only my opinion, but from my own perspective and experience, the Miami Herald's Beth Reinhard can't leave South Florida soon enough.

I know that makes some of you laugh because you know I thought THAT was the case years ago, too. Know that I'd have been only too happy to drive her to the train station to split town if people down here actually took trains.
You're right -it's a long time coming.

But long-frustrated Miami Herald readers finally have a reason to cheer.

Reinhard's oh-so predictable and often deadly-dull Conventional Wisdom take on the passing political scene may've been fine for the Quad Cities in 1966, but among other fatal flaws, she seem handcuffed to the "Usual Suspects," forever quoting the same handful of people with motives she never bothered to reveal.

(And yes, I've been to the Quad Cities area in Iowa, too, spending a week there in Davenport, driving over from Chicago for business in 1987. One night, when I couldn't fall asleep in my hotel room, I went for a walk around midnight, eventually crossing the Rock Island Centennial Bridge (U.S.-67) over the Mississippi River from Davenport to Rock Island.

I was NOT expecting that the bridge sidewalk would be mesh-like metal, since that meant I couldn't look down, otherwise it would have caused me to get dizzy over the water.
It was a VERY weird sensation to walk across the bridge at that hour and just stand there in the middle for 15-20 minutes and think of all the history that has gone past you and below you.

I eventually ate at an IHOP or diner in Rock Island and got back to my hotel room in Davenport around 3:30 a.m. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Island_Centennial_Bridge

I also visited the great minor league ballpark there on the River, then called John O'Donnell Stadium when Quad Cities was a Cubs affiliate. It's now called Modern Woodmen Park and home of the Cardinals' farm team, the River Bandits.
Look at the photos! The Marlins would be lucky to have a view like the one over first base.
http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/team1/page.jsp?ymd=20080606&content_id=410802&vkey=team1_t565&fext=.jsp&sid=t565)

It's no wonder that seasoned political reporters and columnists from outside of Florida, including some I know, were always mystified when they came down here and got a chance to read more than one example of the Reinhard Method, or to hear her talk on TV or radio.

It's not like they expected a patrician David Broder clone or an intellectual David Frum-type would be the leading political reporter at the Herald, since this is Miami, after all, the anti-wonk capital, but they were in no way prepared to see that things were just -as bad- as I had described in phone calls or emails about how little respect or column inches Broward County rated.
They thought I'd always been exaggerating.
Nope.

Earlier this year, after one such reporter friend had visited South Florida and had absorbed some sun and digested some bon mots de Reinhard, and returned home, she emailed me that she's sure that Reinhard probably has some special talent that we're just not privy to.

I replied that could be true but that her writing speaks for itself -mediocre and uninspiring.

Try hard to think of a column or article of her's that questioned the South Florida version of CW, or tried to get to the heart of a matter thru an unconventional approach.
Or even the last time you cut one of her article/columns out of the paper?

You can't, and like 99% of all Herald readers, once you saw the headline of one of her stories, and even more so, of one of her columns, you knew exactly what to expect.

The whole thing was telegraphed because you know she has such a small bag of tricks in her arsenal.
Plus, she never ever surprises you.

Thus, Reinhard never ever veered from her connect-the-dots script, including her failed attempts to seem like a self-effacing Tina Fey at times when it wasn't called for and only served to distract.

Reinhard was too easily pacified and seduced by CW and too often seemed pleased with herself for peddling the mundane.
She was like a slightly less-mean-spirited Tracy Flick, but failed to see the truly compelling stories all around us down here because then she'd have had to leave her comfort zone.
She didn't want to.

That so many people wouldn't return her phone calls, as she recently wrote about Marco Rubio, whom I like and will vote for but who clearly is not without his flaws, may, in fact, not be a result of their not liking what she wrote and actually be something simpler: people feeling that far too often, Reinhard had burned them.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/08/13/1775520/reinhard-rich-political-novices.html

That she called with the article already written in her head, and wasn't open to actually listening to their side or perspective and perhaps re-questioning her original aim with a story.
Facts should matter at least once in a while, shouldn't they?

Seriously, why would you call someone back, much less a reporter, if they won't listen to what you say, and just want to steamroll you about some topic, regardless of what it is?
You doubtless do it all the time with friends and relatives -I know I do.
Why should others be any different?

Reinhard's worst sins in my book was her low-hanging fruit sense of journalism and consistent lack of curiosity, as she failed over-and-over to give readers the sort of insight into some pol or official's motives and outlook that would be helpful to readers in understanding them, and what was going on policy-wise in anti-wonk South Florida.

It was sometimes like she was the daughter of the Beacon Council, the Chamber of Commerce and the Knight Foundation, and only wanted to please already-powerful people.
She'd tut-tut them, perhaps, but always like a loving daughter reproaching her father for something he's wearing that embarrasses her.

I didn't need every article of her's to be like a fascinating Vanity Fair profile from the early-to-mid 1990's under Clinton, but one every few YEARS might've been nice!

(Or maybe I was just spoiled by 15 years of daily reading the WaPo's Style section from 1988-2003. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/print/style/)

Seriously, after all this time, do Herald readers now have any added insight from her into why Meek, Crist or Rubio are the way they are and do what they do?

No, which is why out-of-town/national reporters so consistently seem to get to the heart of a local matter, general sense of mood or pierce a local/state political personality's facade when they drop in, yet she's always... what exactly?

(Compare anything of hers to Tim Padgett's fabulous TIME article exactly one year ago on the State of Florida, Behind Florida's Exodus: Rising Taxes, Political Ineptitude

There are many things public officials probably shouldn't do during a severe recession, but no one seems to have told the leaders in Florida about them. One thing, for instance, would be giving a dozen top aides hefty raises while urging a rise in property taxes, as the mayor of Miami-Dade County recently did. Or jacking up already exorbitant hurricane-insurance premiums, as Florida's government-run property insurer just did. Or sending an army of highly paid lobbyists to push for a steep hike in electricity rates, as South Florida's public utility is doing.

And you wonder why the Sunshine State is experiencing its first net emigration of people since World War II.

Read the rest of the article at:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1919916,00.html Though Hoosier-born Tim lives in Miami as Bureau Chief, it's the same principle.)

Rubio and Meek are both from South Florida, but despite all this proximity, Reinhard has added zero to the mix in our understanding of them or what they might do.

As I've written numerous on my blog about the media coverage of the FL-17 congressional race,
her writing about it was perhaps the best example of her lack of curiosity and imagination: dreadful writing of the sort that you'd expect from a mediocre Junior College newspaper you pick up out of boredom while waiting around for your pick-up order at a Kinko's.

The one congressional seat in South Florida that we knew last year would result in sending a 'new face' to Washington would seem like a great opportunity to re-examine some longstanding ideas about this area, and the CD that stretches from Liberty City to Hollywood, including where I live in Hallandale Beach, not far from Gulfstream Park Race Track.

Instead, there was hardly any reasonable coverage of it to speak of until a week before the election, and by then, it was written not by Reinhard but Patricia Mazzei, who's what, five years out of college?
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/08/17/1778997/9-seek-rare-house-seat-replacing.html

Why is the least-experienced reporter writing about THE most important local congressional race in greater Miami?

That's why it's the Herald.