Blurbex

… over to The Political Whore. Check PoHo blog daily for your dose of goofy or insightful links. Today’s is here.

From the CL intern desk:

USF has not scheduled any official events to celebrate the Bulls upset victory over West Virginia last Friday, but you wouldn’t need the university to sponsor an event to know we’re excited.

Within half an hour after the game, there was a Facebook group called “I rushed the field when we beat West Virginia!” As of today, there are 114 members of a group called “Who’s West Virginia?”

The real fun started after the UF vs. Auburn game on Saturday — which the Gators lost. The target turned from the Mountaineers to that certain school two hours up I-75 from here.

Now, I’ve been to Gators Café and Saloon on Treasure Island for many Saturday Swamp slaughters. I’m usually decked out in a blue tank top and orange hat, but this weekend was different as I finally had my own team of which to be proud. I was nearly pummeled by a 5-foot-11-inch, blonde, face-painted Gator girl who caught me celebrating Auburn’s field goal.

You know USF students are excited when we start trash-talking the Gators. There are already 647 members in the group called “USF beat Auburn when UF couldn’t!” I joined it as soon as I got home.

The most in-your-facebook group of the bunch? USF is #1 in Florida!

— Kat Clement

(Kat Clement is a USF-St. Petersburg journalism student. She was selected for a CL spring 2008 internship.)

We first broke the story about the controversy over the advertisement, and now the daily’s readers are reacting, too. One called the hate-filled ad that ran next to the jump page for the St. Pete Pride parade coverage “a grievous error in judgment.” Another called it public vitriol. Check out the letters here.

Help us settle an argument raging at the CL offices so we can get back to work putting out next week’s issue:

What is the worst Al Pacino performance ever?

I know, I know, this is a topic big enough to drive a dumptruck through. Ham Gravy is fighting hard for Two for the Money. I, of course, am partial to the ham-handedness of his hooo-wahhhing his way to an Oscar for Scent of a Woman.

While you try to decide, here’s a good Pacino soundboard for you to play with.

More accurately known as Reality Check, the exercise last week brought together more than 300 civic leaders from seven counties to model the future of Tampa Bay using red and yellow Lego blocks.

The participants chose the five best plans, which will be trotted out to various public appearances etc. as part of an ongoing effort called One Bay. Here’s a look at the five best (PowerPoint file download).

Unlike other visioning efforts over the past 20 years, this one appears to have some legs to it and strong support from the business community, which has drawn all the elected officials to the same table for a change. The future indeed may lie in one of these collections of Legos. More info on the outcome of the Lego exercise at Reality Check’s Implementation page.

I ran into Mayor Rick Baker at the Reality Check Tampa Bay planning session this morning and asked him about the CONA vote on police services. CONA voted 13-3 on Wednesday night to ask City Council to request a bid from Sheriff Jim Coats to take over police services in St. Petersburg; some neighborhood activists believe it could save tens of millions of dollars.

Baker’s response to the vote and the idea of folding the SPPD was succinct: “It’s a non-starter.”

— Reported by Alex Pickett and Wayne Garcia

It seemed simple enough. Neighborhood activists in St. Pete are faced with reductions in programs aimed at fighting crime and improving the city, due to the potential $22.6 million in budget cuts that may follow property tax reform.
What if, they asked, the city contracted out its police work to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office?

For the past few weeks, they had secretly talked with City Council members about the idea as they gathered financial data to see how much money could be saved.

But asking Sheriff Jim Coats to step in? That part was apparently too hot to handle. When asked about the plan by CL reporters, community leaders who had been briefed about it denied knowing of it or backed away from it quickly — likely because policing in St. Petersburg is a political and racial hot potato.

On Wednesday night, however, the Council Of Neighborhood Associations took the plunge anyway. Its members voted 13-3 to urge the St. Petersburg City Council to send a Request for Proposed Services letter to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office for a cost estimate on outsourcing police duties for the city. CONA’s police review committee will also start researching the matter.

“The rumblings have always been that the Sheriff’s Office could do the policing job for much less than the police department can do it,” says former CONA president Karl Nurse, who presented the issue to the membership. “It looks like the alternative [budget cuts due to property tax reform] could be as much as wipe out everything but police, fire, sewer and garbage services. In that kind of environment, I don’t know how you could not at least ask the question.”

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It is now nine years — to the day — that we lost Francis Albert Sinatra to that great Jilly’s in the Sky. I plan a minute of silence here in the office, followed by a playing of “Softly, As I Leave You.” I’ll save the reading from the Holy Book, “The Way You Wear Your Hat,” for later tonight, in solitude.

Watch this Jimmy Kimmel Live clip a minute in or so to see an amazing performance by an LA newsgal describing just how much humanity the fires in Griffith Park are bringing out in the population. (JKL changes its videos daily to match that night’s shows, so if you didn’t catch this on Thursday, it’s gone.)

Our own Dawn Morgan filled in more than capably last week on Media Talk, discussing the FCC hearing that we covered and that she attended until the late hours of the night. Video here.

For years, the family of imprisoned former USF professor Sami Al-Arian insisted that their nemesis and most dogged chronicler, Tampa Tribune investigative reporter Michael Fechter, was doing the bidding of anti-Arab forces.

Today, they got some more ammo for their argument in the news that Fechter has resigned from the paper to take a job working for Al-Arian critic Steven Emerson.

“It just proves what we’ve known and asserted all along,” said Laila Al-Arian, Sami’s daughter. “I can say we’re not surprised by it.”

Trib editor Janet Coats confirmed Fechter’s resignation and said his last day is today. He could not be reached for comment.

Other longtime critics of Fechter’s work were abuzz with the news. One, Ahmed Bedier of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said, “The Tampa Tribune should revisit his work and act accordingly.” He characterized Fechter’s reporting on Al-Arian as unobjective and slanted. “Fechter was not serving journalism but was serving the interests of an anti-Muslim agenda.”

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Line Halvorsen’s documentary about the struggle of former USF professor Sami Al-Arian, convicted of a single count of conspiracy to aid the terrorist Palestinian Islamic Jihad, is set to make its U.S. premiere later this month at the Tampa Theater.

USA vs. Al-Arian is a powerful, if one-sided, account of the Bush administration’s unending pursuit of the Palestinian advocate, despite a jury’s acquittal of Al-Arian on many counts against him and the increasingly apparent fact that Al-Arian was not the terrorist mastermind as the government made him out to be. Al-Arian accepted a plea deal on one count to end his ordeal and allow him to be deported, something the government has blocked despite his plea. The film shows the anquish of his case through his family’s eyes.

The film has played to awards and good reviews overseas, making the Al-Arian family celebrities in such places as Norway.

The 7:30 p.m. May 16 screening at Tampa Theater is sponsored by the local chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and will be followed by a panel discussion.

Since our offices are in West Tampa, we’ve taken a special interest in this neighborhood, which has a long and storied history. I even put it on the cover with a story about its revitalization.

It is a hyperlocal story, but West Tampa’s rebirth has ramifications for every single neighborhood in Tampa Bay, as well as mass transit. It’s because West Tampa is the ideal candidate for regrowth at much higher densities than currently exist, especially along Howard and Armenia avenues, where 3- to 4-story homes could create a very European feel and would be appropriate for making a dense enough neighborhood that could effectively be served by mass transit and light rail.

One of the major players in rebuilding this lower income, racially mixed neighborhhood is former Hillsborough County Commissioner Ed Turanchik, whose InTown Homes is constructing historically appropriate, low-cost housing for residents who agree to live in them for a period of years and not just flip them for a profit, as speculators do in other gentrifying neighborhoods.

Turanchik had run into some trouble in trying to introduce a new, less expensive design and had been rebuffed by the West Tampa Community Development Corp., a nonprofit that acts as a civic association-meets-chamber of commerce. The CDC is dominated by some older neighborhood residents who, frankly, are less ambitious and less aggressive about change. Last week, the CDC voted against Turanchik’s plan, a recommendation that then went to City Council.

It looks like, though, the City Council came through and approved the change, which amounts to allowing Turanchik to build a Mediterranean model with a flat roof instead of the historic-overlay-required slanted roof. Bill Sharpe of Sticks of Fire has a good account of the decision here.

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Where the hell did Morning Roundup go? And why no music news? Politics? What the hell is going on with Blurbex? And what does Blurbex mean anyway? (Blog for Urban Explorers, but I digress.)

For those who missed our switchover to a new server two weeks ago, let me quickly restate that we have created three new blogs so that what little productivity you have at work can fly completely out the window. The trio are:

Political Whore. The blog will be here, and you can get your RSS feeds from here. I’m going to move Morning Roundup over to Political Whore. so make sure you check there for your AM dose of snark.

Second, we’re starting a new music blog, focusing on the best shows coming to Tampa Bay and our area’s great local acts. Wade Tatangelo will helm this blog, likely with some help along the way. Tampa Calling will be found here, and RSS feed here.

And third, our killer food writer and restaurant critic Brian Ries has his own blog, Eat My Florida. You’ll get the inside scoop on where he’s been eating — and what he’s been eating. The new blog is here, and the RSS here. Once Brian recovers from eating all that pizza he will be up and running on Eat My Florida.

Cross-posted from Sugg blog:

Laila Al-Arian, daughter of Sami Al-Arian, about whom I’ve written volumes over the last 12 years, is featured on the Huffington Post.

Her article contains links to some of what I and others have written about her imprisoned father.

— John Sugg

Paul McCartney + Distribution deal with Starbucks = New song preview

Political Whore takes in the Obama show and reviews it here.

A big shout-out to CL’s food critic, Brian Ries, who is a finalist in the Best Criticism category in the 2007 Sunshine State Awards, which are administered by the South Florida chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

The Tampa Tribune is a finalist for its work on investigating the Expressway Authority.

Here’s a full list of finalists: (more…)

Until we move Blurbex over to a new server. Full info here, including links for RSS.

For now, just go ahead and check out the new Blurbex site and our new political, music and food blogs at:

Blurbex
Eat My Florida
Tampa Calling
Political Whore

And Morning Roundup fans, don’t forget I’ve moved that over to the new Whoreblog. Today’s installment is here.

Just another reminder: MR has moved over to the Political Whore blog.