The Political Whore

What will you do with your government stimulus check?

• Barack’s “victory lap.”
• Hillary just keeps on campaigning.
• “Dear Barack, why are you being such a stickler for the rules?”
• Let the Lebanese civil war commence.
• Citigroup to trim about $400 billion worth of fat.
• WTF: The 3-year old St. Pete boy who has never fallen asleep.
• Your Lost recap. (I have to start watching the show alone so I can hear over all the people in the room bad-mouthing it as it plays.)
• Dude, that’s not what we meant by “head shop.”

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A bad decision for supporter of equality, out of the Michigan Supreme Court, which ruled that the state’s anti-gay marriage amendment prohibits domestic partnership benefits. More about it over at Fix It Now blog.

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Couch potatoes unite!

• The mother of the St. Pete courthouse gunman blames shootout on “antigovernment Web sites.”
• Clinton’s five big boo boos …
• … and her three options.
• Bush mucks with the FCC to help out his old buddy/election law-flouter John McCain.
• Toyota feels the sting of the U.S. economic slowdown.
• The high price of intelligence.
• The Olympic torch makes it to the protester-free summit of Mt. Everest.
• No GTA IV in India. Reason: a global shortage.

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Let’s leave aside for a second whether the Iraq War to this point has been folly or necessity and take as given that any dollars we spend going forward are pretty much wasted. If that is true, the National Priorities Project has a very nifty trade-off calculator that tells us all the goodies we could have in Tampa Bay if we didn’t fund the war over the next two budget years:

Taxpayers in Tampa Bay Metro Area, Florida will pay $1.1 billion for the President’s request for additional Iraq war spending in FY2008 and FY2009. For the same amount of money, the following could have been provided:

378,693 People with Health Care for One Year OR

754,817 Homes with Renewable Electricity for One Year OR

24,723 Public Safety Officers for One year OR

17,145 Music and Arts Teachers for One Year OR

334,774 Scholarships for University Students for One Year OR

74 New Elementary Schools OR

7,915 Affordable Housing Units OR

593,198 Children with Health Care for One Year OR

146,444 Head Start Places for Children for One Year OR

18,300 Elementary School Teachers for One Year OR

13,043 Port Container Inspectors for One year

The calculator lets you run similar trade-off calculations for repealing Bush’s tax cuts and other administration priorities.

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Russert called it, so you know it must be over.

• Split decision …
• … but Hillary’s running out of options.
• Breaking down the “Limbaugh Effect.”
• Ron Paul just keeps on runnin’.
• The Unlucky 13: Florida banks living on the edge.
• Bill Gates predicts the future.
• The Rays new stadium: The windup before the pitch.
• Turns out the White House was fond of recycling their e-mail backup tapes.

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See you at Radiohead tonight?

• Please God, let it somehow end tonight.
• Myanmar tries to pick up the pieces.
• McCain denies he didn’t vote for Bush in 2000, which is puzzling since it was the best news about him in a week.
• “She said, ‘You’ve been accused of wizardry,’ Piculas said.”
• The DC Madam’s suicide notes. Notes, plural. Uh-huh.
• Oil: Still cheaper than a house made of gold bars.
• When Yanks vs. Sox turns deadly …
• Come and get it: Free Nine Inch Nails.

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Denise Layne, a Lutz civic activist instrumental in such recent causes as the EPC wetlands issue, says she will announce her candidacy for the Hillsborough County Commission next week in the seat being held by EPC foe Brian Blair. She is a Democrat and will face a primary against Kevin Beckner and Joe Redner. Story is developing …

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Second time in the past few weeks that we’ve seen this storyline play out in the local dailies:

What has become of the Tampa City Council?

Council members often spend hours debating issues over which they have little say - such as complaints about Verizon’s customer service or whether to make state road Florida Avenue a two-way thoroughfare - while issues they can influence often take weeks if not months to resolve.

One of the major complaints in the Trib version of this tale? The “highly paid” administrators that Mayor Pam Iorio dispatches to answer Council questions are left sitting there for hours.

Boo-fricking-hoo.

The developers’ lawyers who make up 90 percent of the audience aren’t quoted as complaining, because they’re ringing up billable hours, so they don’t really give a shit when their case gets heard.

What’s going on with this spate of stories about the “dysfunctional” Council?

No doubt it is push-back caused by increasingly strident Council members, mainly Linda Saul-Sena, Mary Mulhern and John Dingfelder. You know how it is around these parts: ask a few too many questions and somebody is dropping a dime to the fishwrap to spin up a negative story about you.

Let’s face it, the Council has always been a slow and somewhat dysfunctional body. It has limited powers under the city charter: to set the budget, vote on allowing restaurants and bars to serve alcohol and decide zoning cases, among a small list of responsibilities. The relationship between this board and Mayor Iorio has not been good, but I’ve seen worse. It seems to me that a healthy dose of dissent and questioning is a good thing (unlike over in St. Pete, where until recently, blind loyalty to Mayor Rick Baker was a given). Otherwise you have a rubber-stamp board’s whose concern is not doing right for the public but getting some “highly paid” bureaucrat back to his or her desk in a timely manner.

Worse still is this from the Council’s chairman:

 ”I’m a lot more frustrated,” said council Chairman Tom Scott, who served on the county commission when that board was considered highly dysfunctional.

If the board meetings are a mess, can’t the chairman do something about it? He does, after all, run the meetings, doesn’t he? . Scott is a capable man; we could expect him to control the board’s activities, unlike the previous chairwoman, Gwen Miller.

Let’s hope he doesn’t. If this kind of dysfunctionality is giving us a green-building ordinance with real incentives and hope of working (Councilman Dingfelder’s suggestion) or questions about the city’s lack of involvement in the EPC struggle (Councilwoman Mulhern on that one, to the consternation of the mayor), I say bring on more dysfunctionality.

(Full disclosure: Mulhern was the visual arts critics for CL prior to her election.) 

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I knew there was a reason to like former NYC police commandante Bernie Kerik, who served a short stint in the service of George W. Bush’s efforts to fuck up Iraq. Former U.S. military commander in Iraq Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez writes in a new book that Bernie’s efforts ostensibly training the Iraqi police there was a complete waste of time:

Sanchez said Kerik focused more on “conducting raids and liberating prostitutes” than training the Iraqis.

For the record, the NY Daily News reports, Kerik denies arresting any prostitutes. The story is silent as to whether he admits liberating any.

Sanchez’s overall assessment of Bernie also could be applied to quite a few in Das Bushen Administrationen:

“I would be hard-pressed to identify a major national-level success that his organization accomplished in that time,” Sanchez told The News a day before his new memoir, “Wiser in Battle” hits bookstores nationwide.

“He is a very energetic guy. He is very confident - overconfident to an extent - and he is very superficial in his understanding of the requirements of his job,” Sanchez said. “His whole contribution was a waste of time and effort.”

Bernie is currently facing federal charges of perjury, tax fraud and taking payoffs, none of them related to prostitution.

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Yeah, I know, it’s shameless bandwagoning, but this is far too good and funny to let the opportunity pass:

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