Daily Loaf

Creative Loafing, Inc. announced today that Marty Petty, the former publisher of the St. Petersburg Times and Hartford Courant, has been named chief executive officer for the alternative newspaper weekly chain.

The announcement was made this morning by interim CEO Richard Gilbert at the Tampa paper’s headquarters in Ybor City.   In a press release, Gilbert called Petty’s experience “an unique mix seldom found in one publishing executive.  She has solid journalistic values honed from her early career in the newsroom and her long-standing commitment to hard-hitting journalism.  All three of her last papers earned Pulitzer Prizes during her leadership.   As publisher of two of the nation’s most highly respected newspapers, she has also earned a reputation as a skilled and creative marketing and sales executive who knows how to build strategic alliances to ensure success.”

Petty will be working on a part-time basis until January as she gets up to speed on what is happening with the six-paper chain.  Speaking to the staff this morning, she said, “I love this business.  It’s about great stories — and making the money to pay for them.”

When asked what she thinks of the quality of Creative Loafing’s papers, which include the Washington City Paper and Chicago Reader as well as the CL papers in Tampa, Atlanta, Charlotte and Sarasota, she said she could not give a full evaluation until she is looking at them on a regular basis.  “I have not gone deep yet,” she said to the assembled staff. Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Sherman was the St. Pete Times restaurant critic for 17 years, until he decided to give up the gig at the end of 2006 because of ongoing health problems. He remained a staff writer for the Times and became the restaurant editor and travel writer for its sister publication, Florida Trend Magazine, where he hands out the generically illustrious Golden Spoon Awards.

Now, as of November 1, he’s blogging for big Bay area wine and spirits shop B-21. Does that constitute a conflict of interest, considering his work at Florida Trend? Eh, it certainly wouldn’t here at CL, now that we’ve trended towards giving a voice to people in the community on our blog and in the paper. Although it is curious that in his first post, when he mentions his work at the St. Pete Times, the outgoing link goes to B-21’s weekly newspaper ad, not the Times site.

Photo by james ostrand

[Editor's Note: Jim Harper, a former editor of the Weekly Planet (now Creative Loafing), covered St. Petersburg government, politics and racial issues from 1996 to 2000 for the St. Petersburg Times.]

I’ve been following the St. Pete mayor’s race fairly closely. Even though I don’t especially like either candidate, they are who you’ve got. And you have to make a choice.

Let me start by saying that I have never really liked Kathleen Ford. I covered her first race for City Council for the Times a dozen years ago, and caused her great grief by quoting her as saying something like “the reason the Old Northeast is important is because it provides a buffer for Snell Isle.” What Snell Isle should be buffered from, she didn’t say.

I sat in her Old Northeast living room — with a prim, severe portrait of some white woman from an earlier century glaring down from the mantel — and I listened to her talk about how tattoo parlors did not belong in downtown St. Petersburg. She also criticized retro clothing stores and anything else that might represent a messy creative revival in downtown St. Pete.

I mentioned all this in my coverage. (Well, maybe not the severe WASP ancestor portrait; I’ve got some of those in my own family, and I’m not sure what they mean.)

Her council opponent was weak. She won.

Fast-forward 10 years. I’ve read a lot about the current Ford model from sources other than the St. Petersburg Times, which seems to be  carrying my old torch in looking for ways to discredit her. And from what I can tell — despite her new, more user-friendly veneer: “Ford 2.0,” as she calls it — she seems still to be ill-tempered, snide, prone to say weird and prejudiced things when she speaks off the top of her head.

But — and this is a big but — she also has an impressive command of the details of city government  — including the balance of power that the City Charter prescribes between the mayor and the City Council. (Read her interview in last week’s Creative Loafing, where she applies that knowledge to the baseball question. Sounds like a reasonable position to me, and I’m a die-hard Rays fan. Gave my left nut to attend division and ACLS playoffs last year, and I’ve never missed an Opening Day.)

Ford also has a keen sense of what many St. Petersburg residents mistrust about their municipal government: Read the rest of this entry »

St. Petersburg registered voters have until 7 p.m. tonight to cast their ballot for mayor and five City Council races.

There will be no prediction in this space on who will be the victor tonight.  All indications going into today are that it will be a close race, though we can say with certainty that as of this writing, over 22,000 registered voters have sent in their ballots by mail, nearly 38 percent of those who requested those ballots before today’s election.

Though newspaper endorsements have lost their influence over the years, there is still the belief that the St. Pete Times editorial page carries a punch when it comes to their choices.

Today’s editorial, entitled “Vote for steady progress,” is again a variation on the theme that the page has carried since the general election in early September — that a vote for Kathleen Ford would be a disaster for the city.

In the editorial, the Times writes almost mournfully about the “over-reliance” on voting by mail (which is probably accurate) by Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark.  But the Times chides Clark in reference to Ford’s now weeks-old gaffe uttered on Bubba the Love Sponge’s show:

More than 20,000 St. Petersburg voters already have cast ballots, meaning as much as half the vote could be in before the polls open today. Thousands of those ballots were cast before mayoral candidate Kathleen Ford used a derogatory racial term in reference to Deputy Mayor Goliath Davis III on a radio show, then dodged reporters for days before illogically claiming she was set up. How many of those voters would like their ballots back?

The editorial concludes by looking at past history as a (hopeful) indication of tonight’s results:

St. Petersburg voters usually favor steady progress over abrupt changes in direction. For that tradition to continue, voters who have been largely silent in this campaign season have to go to the polls today and be counted.

The contempt for Ford and her supporters has been pretty consistent on that page.  If Ms. Ford is victorious tonight, a sure loser other than her opponent will be that editorial page.

The St. Petersburg mayoral race (that clears its first hurdle next Tuesday in the primary election) would clearly work better as either a reality show or an awards ceremony. After watching the big mayoral forum last week sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times and Bay News 9, I’m going with awards ceremony. The envelopes, please:

Best embrace of St. Pete Pride: Candidates Jamie Bennett, Kathleen Ford, Ed Helm, John Warren, Deveron Gibbons and Scott Wagman all said they would sign a city proclamation for gay pride.

Ronda Storms Award: For refusing to agree to recognize gay pride events, Paul Congemi, Bill Foster, Larry Williams and Richard Eldridge.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bill Foster wasted no time in getting the Times recommendation on his website

The drumbeat that the St. Petersburg Times was considering an endorsement (errr, recommendation, as the Times will always let a candidate know its preferred term) of Bill Foster. On its surface, it seems ludicrous. After all, Foster is the same guy who wrote to the school board a few years back making a strong pitch against teaching Darwinian evolution alone in public schools, hoping it would mix in a bit of “intelligent design.”

But the lack of an emerging alternative to Foster left the Times in the inexplicable position of endorsing an anti-gay rights, anti-evolution mayor of St. Petersburg. More to the point, however, the editorial board chooses a candidate based on who will play ball with it. Which candidate will kiss the ring over on 1st Avenue S? That’s what gets you the recommendation. Disagree with the Times on a core concern at the paper — say, firing Police Chief Chuck Harmon, as Scott Wagman as vowed to do — and you are at a disadvantage, to say the least.

It is OK to disagree with the Times on social conservative issues, as long as you play your cards right, promise not to let those views play out in public policy at City Hall and generally keep your wingy-ness in the closet. After all, the Times’ former editorial chief, Phil Gailey, was totally tight with Rick Baker, who was also a social conservative who refused to recognize gay pride parades or appear in them.

From its recommendation today: Read the rest of this entry »

The Think+Drink film fest focuses on cultural, social and scientific topics and the “American Music Series” prior to each movie explores the history and icons of the music that have shaped America, presenting a live performance by a new local musician each week. The July 30 selection is Standing in the Shadows of Motown, a documentary that follows the Funk Brothers, a collection of Detroit musicians who played back-up for nearly every hit to come out of Motown Records, featuring performances by stars like Chaka Khan, Bootsy Collins, Ben Harper and Joan Osbourne. T-Bone Rhodes performs live before the film. Music begins at 6 p.m. and films begin at 7 p.m. every Thursday through Aug. 27 unless otherwise noted. Visit southfloridamuseum.org for more info. Bishop Planetarium, Bradenton, $8, $6 students, $5 museum members.

Belize-born author and copy editor of the St. Petersburg Times, Ian Vasquez reads from and signs his latest novel Lonesome Point, about two Belizean brothers living in Miami who have wildly disparate lifestyles and goals (one is a mental health worker, the other a Miami mayoral prospect), but work together to escape the shame of their father’s illegal activities. Thu., July 30, 7 p.m., Inkwood Books, Tampa, free, inkwoodbooks.com.

The GirlStories Theatre Project presents Power Up: The Hero Within, an original play with music and monologues by nearly 20 middle school girls. Powerstories Theatre helms the project, which partners with social service agencies to invite a diverse group of girls, ages 10 to 17, to participate in workshops that use “creative discovery techniques, dramatics, storytelling, writing and art activities to help the girls communicate more effectively and to tell their own stories with confidence.” The public performance is a culmination of the six-week course, and allows the girls to share newfound insights on their goals and dreams for the future. Check them out at youtube.com/Powerstories or visit powerstories.com for more info. July 30-Aug. 1, 1:30 p.m. Thurs., 7:30 p.m. Fri.-Sat., The Ritz Ybor, 1503 E. Seventh Ave., Ybor City, $10, free for children under 6.

In general, I like St. Pete Times restaurant critic Laura Reiley. She’s rarely negative, has a bigger dining budget than me, and gets to jet off to Beard dinners in NY, but despite that I’ve found her to be a very nice person. Until now.

She just posted a tidbit on her blog called “I’m laughing at Creative Loafing lovers” where she calls out the numerous voters in our recent Tampa Bay’s Top 50 Restaurants reader recommendation poll. Here’s what she said:

I happened to take a gander at their Tampa Bay Top 50 Restaurants Reader Recommendation Results post (seeing as we’ve been running a reader poll of our own, it seemed only fair) and feel that Creative Loafing readers must be smoking something. Their top recommended restaurants? In order: Paci’s Pizza, The Floridian, Bin 27, Green Springs Bistro, Backfin Blue and Bamboozle. Huh. The top-most, super-special, gotta-try-it restaurant in the whole area is PACI’S PIZZA?

Maybe our readers are cool because they are smoking something, Laura, did you consider that?

Admittedly, I spent a few hours making fun of Paci’s ballot-stuffing efforts yesterday — which is why we only let you pot fiends pick 5 while I picked 45 –  but that was before I tried their pizza. Now? I’m kinda happy they won a spot in the Top 50. That pie is very, very good.

Stick it to Reiley by voting for the best of Tampa Bay’s Top 50 Restaurants, in five different categories, later today.

You’d think so from the way the judges have been fawning over him; in fact, Simon Cowell says a Lambert win is already in the bag. And according to some critics, the St. Petersburg Times‘ Eric Deggans among them, American Idol needs Lambert to win to retain some measure of cred.

I agree with Deggans that it’d be cool if America made a “semi-kinda-sorta-openly gay man” its Idol, even if, as the New York Times‘ Stephen Holden suggests, the whole sexuality angle has been “overhyped.” But if Lambert doesn‘t win, I’d hate to see the blame fixed on the is-he/isn’t-he question. Because the potential problem with Lambert isn’t that he’s so out-of-the-box — it’s just the opposite. His performances have become predictable. Read the rest of this entry »

“Likely to be the movie of the summer.” “A hard act to follow.” “A satisfying summer blockbuster.”

And that’s just the Tampa Bay critics (the Tribune’s Kevin Walker, the Times’ Steve Persall, and CL’s own Joe Bardi, respectively). Star Trek’s status as this summer’s movie to beat has been confirmed with surprising unanimity across the board, from the big guns to the blogosphere (with a whopping 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer, certifying Trek as the best-reviewed movie to date in 2009). And this time the critics are likely to be right. Star Trek fires on all cylinders with  good acting, witty script, characters you actually care about (and $7 million in box office on Thursday alone), while from the looks of previews the rest of the season is going to be one long CGI explosion of little interest whatsoever.

Read on for links to Star Trek reviews. Note: Not everyone was enchanted. The Chicago Sun-Times‘ Roger Ebert and The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane were distinctly underwhelmed. (Funniest, if meanest line: Lane says that these days Leonard Nimoy “makes Bela Lugosi look like Zac Ephron”). Read the rest of this entry »

This state inspires so much great prose, it’s amazing we can keep up.

Here’s a half dozen great new Florida books you need to get your mitts on.

THEY PUT UP A PARKING LOT: From some of the same folks who brought you a Pulitzer Prize comes Paving Paradise (University Press of Florida, $27).  Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite tell a complex and on-its-face unsexy story about water in Florida.  But it works, drawing readers into its difficult subject by resorting to the dirtiest trick in the journalist’s bag of tricks: great storytelling.

Pittman and Waite use several people – some heroic, some shady – to examine the political shell game that makes white equal black and no equal yes. They tell the story through the eyes of politicians, developers, bait-shop owners and a league of people who mourn what’s happened to this state.

Based on their award-winning series for the St. Petersburg Times, Paving Paradise is the perfect way to give a longer shelf life to a vital work of journalism. Pittman and Waite are a couple of the best journalists practicing the craft in the country today. 

It makes us wonder if there will be a place for journalism like this in a few years. If newspapers still exist, will they give over this much space to an in-depth report. Will book publishers then give reporters the space to expand on their work?

This isn’t a story that works well on Twitter.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben & Jerry’s celebrate its 30th annual Free Cone Day today with free scoops of all its favorites — Chunky Monkey, Cherry Garcia and Chubby Hubby — as well as some of its newest offerings like Fair Trade Chocolate & Vanilla Ice Creams Swirled Together with Fudge-Covered Macadamia Nuts and Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brickle Road, and Triple Caramel Chunk. Participating local stores: Ben & Jerry’s St. Petersburg, 189 Second Ave., Space 104, St. Petersburg, 727-822-2653; USF Tampa, 4204 E. Fowler Ave., Tampa, 913-974-1185; and USF Student Union, 4202 E. Fowler Ave., MSC 1100D, Tampa, 813-974-4266. Call each individual store for hours.

Florida Holocaust Museum hosts Holocaust Remembrance Day or Yom HaShoah, a day of remembrance, which includes a presentation of the Righteous Among the Nations award by the Israeli Consulate to the Nauta Family. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance of Israel organization, presents the award to those who risked their lives to help Jews during the Holocaust. Rabbi Danielle Upbin leads the service and students from Pinellas County Jewish Day School sing. 6:30 p.m., Florida Holocaust Museum, St. Petersburg, free, flholocaustmuseum.org. Read the rest of this entry »

Big news out of Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center this morning: As the first initiative of its Broadway Genesis Project, TBPAC is producing a new musical by Frank Wildhorn (The Civil War, Jekyll & Hyde) with hopes of taking it to Broadway. Wonderland: Alice’s New Musical Adventure is an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland “set in present-day Manhattan and a timeless Wonderland” in which an author named Alice Corwinkle travels “through the Looking-Glass from New York City to a strange-yet-familiar place where she must reclaim her daughter, defeat the Queen of Hearts and learn to follow her heart.” Wildhorn (pictured) is writing the music, with lyrics by Jack Murphy and book by Phoebe Hwang; the show has its world premiere at TBPAC in December.

Getting a show ready for Broadway is no easy task, but TBPAC President Judith Lisi says in a release that it’s “the next logical step in TBPAC’s artistic development.” With Wildhorn, the center has a proven commodity of sorts, a Tony-nominated composer with a strong fan base who once had three shows running simultaneously on Broadway. But as John Fleming noted in his story in today’s St. Pete Times, Wildhorn’s Broadway reviews have been “lukewarm at best.”

That’s putting it mildly. Read the rest of this entry »

Andrea Deszo contemplates her garden

It’s hard work starting up a community garden. Here in Bartlett Park we’re so proud that our garden is one year old this weekend.  For twelve months, more than a hundred volunteers have hauled dirt, mulch, water, compost, plants, food, chairs, fencing, pvc pipes and friends out to 1443 Highland Street South in St Petersburg to take a vacant lot from bare to bountiful, from scary to sublime, from dangerous to delicious.

We were guided by visions of fresh tomatoes, homemade pesto, beans and collard greens, as well as cookouts and gardening workshops. The concrete, garbage and weeds were all cleared with the intention of creating a beautiful space in the midst of a neighborhood that’s seen a lot of hard times. We’ve worked every single Saturday for a year. You can check out Lara Cerri’s photo montage about the garden in the St Pete Times here to see some of the action. [Editor's Note: And check out the garden's Creative Loafing Best of the Bay award here.] Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s St. Petersburg Times has a story from the Washington Post by Ann Hornaday about Oscar “orphans” — good films that got caught up in money problems or other unfortunate circumstances that prevented them from being released in time for Oscar consideration. Tops on her list of movies left in Oscar limbo is this year’s Gasparilla International Film Festival opening night film: Rod Lurie’s Nothing But the Truth, starring Kate Beckinsale in a story that echoes the Judith Miller/Valerie Plame case. So, even though Hornaday’s piece says the films she’s writing about “will not be playing at a theater near you,” in Tampa Bay (for a change) that’s not exactly the case. (The Rod Lurie-produced What Doesn’t Kill You, another “limbo” film she mentions, is also scheduled to be shown at GIFF).

John Rosser wrote previously for The Daily Loaf about how GIFF snagged Truth for opening night. See his blog post here.

This week, St. Pete Times restaurant critic Laura Reiley reviewed Ocean Prime, which had been open for just over two weeks. That just sucks.

I like Reiley quite a bit, although we’ve never managed to get together for that lunch we’ve emailed each other about (call me, Laura!). And no, I’m not accusing her of some sort of ethical malfeasance or critic faux pas. Let me explain. Read the rest of this entry »

For most of the Tampa Bay media, it is all hands on deck for Super Bowl coverage as we near the game on Sunday. This has been building for weeks, with the crescendo in newsprint, online sites, video and audio over the past week.

The Super Bowl website on tampabay.com

Overall, though, my main thought about the coverage is: Damn! It would take a normal human being 237 years to read all of this. Most of it is ephemeral; on a blog or website front one minute, lost in the archives the next. You imagined that if the local media paid this much attention to our economy and government we would be the only metro area in the nation not suffering from a recession or corruption.

Given that caveat, here is a look at how they did, from worst to best, among the major media players in the Tampa Bay Market:

Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday, John Fleming’s article accusing me of a conflict of interest was published in the St. Pete Times. I’ve already responded to these charges in earlier blogs. But Sunday’s article upped the ante: John said that because my review of Tommy J and Sally came out in Creative Loafing a week before my review of Jobsite Theater’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile, I could be suspected of showing favoritism to the Studio at the expense of Jobsite. This is nonsense. The fact is that Tommy J was only running for two weekends while Picasso was running for three, and therefore I had to get the Studio review published first if I were to review the show at all. Reason: For over a decade, Creative Loafing’s policy has been only to publish reviews of shows that are still running when the review comes out. If I’d waited a week, the show would have closed before my review appeared — meaning no review at all. I was aware that Studio artistic director Bob Devin Jones had worked closely with author Mark Medoff on the play in the Washington D.C. area, and that Medoff was coming to St. Petersburg for the premiere. The production sounded important and I didn’t want to miss a chance to weigh in on it. So I reviewed it first, and the next week reviewed the Jobsite show.

But as long as John Fleming has put my treatment of the Studio out there as possible evidence of favoritism, let’s look at the two plays that premiered there before Tommy J . In early December, the Studio offered Circumference of a Squirrel — and I gave 90 percent of my column that week (Dec. 10-17) to Six Degrees of Separation at Gorillla Theatre, and a total of one paragraph at the end of the column to Circumference. Is this favoritism? The Studio show before that one was Terrible Jim Fitch (November 6-7). But because that was only running for one weekend, I didn’t review it, preview it, or even mention it in my column at all. Is that favoritism? I only wish that John, in his phone conversation with me about the article he was contemplating, had asked me about the Tommy J review. Then he might have refrained from suggesting, to all the thousands of SPTimes readers that my integrity had been compromised. I’ve been theater critic for Creative Loafing for more than ten years, and this is the first time that anyone has suggested that my opinions have been influenced by any sort of favoritism for any sort of reason. I don’t like it and I’m not going to sit back quietly while it happens.

As mentioned in an earlier post, the St. Pete Times’ John Fleming has raised conflict-of-interest questions re Creative Loafing’s theater critic, Mark E. Leib, who has reviewed shows at theaters where he either has or will have readings or productions of his plays. In making his argument, Fleming allowed that it wasn’t unheard of for critics to also be playwrights, and mentioned Village Voice theater critic Michael Feingold, who is also a playwright and translator, as a prominent example.

I know Michael, so I emailed him to get his take on the issue. Interestingly enough, he also knows Mark: he was the dramaturg for a production of one of Mark’s plays when it was staged at ART in Cambridge, MA. While Michael was happy to hear of another writer following the “classic dual path” of theater critic/playwright, he acknowledged there are pitfalls. Here’s what he said: Read the rest of this entry »

As discussed earlier on the Daily Loaf, St. Petersburg Times performing arts critic John Fleming recently questioned Creative Loafing theater critic Mark E. Leib about a possible conflict of interest in Leib’s relationship with two theaters. Now Fleming has published his criticisms in the Times.

Here’s the situation:  Gorilla Theatre recently hosted a staged reading of Leib’s new play, A River in the Desert, and this spring the Studio@620 will stage Leib’s Art People. Fleming, backed up by the ethics chair of the American Theatre Critics Association (Lawrence Bommer, a Chicago critic/playwright who has written reviews for CL sister paper the Chicago Reader), points out that because Leib reviews plays at both Gorilla and 620, having his own plays produced at these venues gives the appearance of a conflict of interest.

There are valid questions to be asked here, and Mark answered them on the Daily Loaf, generating a debate in the comments section between past and present CL staffers. But the Times article tries to pump up the controversy further with a question I find bogus: Read the rest of this entry »

So now we’re less than a week away from the staged reading of my play A RIVER IN THE DESERT at Gorilla Theatre and I get an e-mail from John Fleming, arts critic for the St. Petersburg Times. What he wants to know is, isn’t it a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of such a conflict, for me to have a reading at a theater that I also review? And further, isn’t this also the case with the full production of my play ART PEOPLE at The Studio at 620 later in the spring? Am I perhaps being unethical? Please comment. I call him immediately and leave a message on his voice mail. Then, this morning, he calls me at home and asks for a response. I tell him this: During the ten years that I’ve been theater critic for Creative Loafing, I’ve made it a policy never to ask a local theater to produce one of my plays. I’ve always felt that that would be putting an intolerable pressure on the theater’s artistic director, who might worry that I would review his theater’s work negatively if he/she didn’t produce my work. But last year, Bob Devin Jones of The Studio@620 asked me to be one of the writers interviewed in the Studio’s writers series. Read the rest of this entry »

Yep, new CL contributor and recipe maven Leslie Green — the Hungry Housewife — has been picked as one of nine Bay area folks to watch this year by the St. Pete Times. Check out her photo (it’s number three in the series) and click on “caption” to read her story. Or you can read it here in the pages of CL.

Check out all of Leslie’s recipes, at least at CL, or head to her blog.

As we ruminate further on the decline of newspaper journalism (Holy Smoke! The Detroit papers will be available only online five days of the week!), let’s celebrate something that makes newspapers so important to us – great columnists.

Florida is blessed with several of the best in the nation, and luckily the University Press of Florida has begun a program of preserving great newspaper columns as part of a series on Florida culture, edited by University of South Florida professors Gary Mormino and Raymond Arsenault. Mormino and Arsenault offer a master’s degree  in Florida Studies. Woo hoo!

Jeff Klinkenberg of the St. Petersburg Times is one of Florida’s greatest blessings and his latest collection, Pilgrim in the Land of Alligators (University Press of Florida, $24.95), is another entry in his “Real Florida” crusade against anything false and manufactured with the stench of a theme park attached.

Klinkenberg — that’s him wrestling an alligator at right — hits the road to find off-the-beaten trail people and places, examples of the old, weird and wonderful Florida.

Imagine this scene: You pull up at a desolate Florida Panhandle gas pump to fill up the guzzler. There’s a picture of that bad-ass cop on the pump, warning you that if you drive off without paying you are dogmeat. Then the real-life cop pictured on the gas pump pulls up next to you. What happens next, of course, is a great story.

Great, serendipitious things like that happen to Klinkenberg.

Read the rest of this entry »

In today’s St. Pete Times, columnist Robyn Blumner tears John McCain a new one for his last-gasp effort to brand Barack Obama as our next “Redistributionist-in-Chief.” Here’s one key passage:

Redistributing wealth is what all nations do to one degree or another. In fact, there is no other way to describe the recent $700-billion rescue of the nation’s financial sector. Here, with McCain’s support, we have redistributed wealth upwards from average Americans to the institutions that employ a big chunk of the nation’s multimillionaires.