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Just a reminder, we’re taking the night off tonight from the convention open thread (how much excitement can you take, anyway?) and instead watching a replay of Mad Men on AMC HD, cuz I missed it on Sunday night.
I’ll open a thread Thursday night at 9 p.m. to catch the run-up to the main event, Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. Join us for commentary, wisecracks and various other observations.
According to the election returns map, Kevin Beckner did pretty well across the entire Hillsborough County yesterday in winning his Democratic primary and a shot at Republican incumbent Commissioner Brian Blair.
His campaign consultant says social networking media played a big role.
This from the consultant today:
Quietly, behind the scenes in yesterday’s elections, there was a coup among Pinellas Democrats. The victim was party chairwoman, Toni Molinaro, who was generally credited with increasing the local party’s coffers and keeping infighting to a minimum.
Molinaro was defeated in an election in her south St. Petersburg neighborhood for precinct committeewoman by Blanche L. Ganey (described in news accounts as a church administrator and Obama supporter), by a vote of 88-40. In order to remain as chairwoman at the party’s December reorganizational meeting, Molinaro had to be an elected precinct committeewoman.
At least partially behind the back-door ouster of Molinaro was the man she replaced in 2006, former St. Pete mayoral candidate Ed Helm.
“I’m looking for new leadership,” Helm told me this afternoon.
The Pinellas Democratic Executive Committee for years has been among the most contentious and controversial in of the DEC’s in the state, with wild swings from faction. Helm’s five-month term was among the wildest, with accusations that his wife’s PAC violated elections laws and his own actions in endorsing some Democrats over others drawing the attention and censure of the state party, which withheld money from the Pinellas organization.
When she beat him out for the job, Molinaro told the St. Petersburg Times, “He alienates people, and he alienates good people.”
Looks like payback is a bitch.
Helm and his band of stalwart progressives used a little known state law that sees local political parties disbanded and reorganized every presidential election year. Only those people who signed notarized oaths during a weeklong window in June of this year could run for precinct positions that would give them a vote during the December reorganizational meeting. Not that Helm can take all the credit; the Barack Obama campaign has also been working hard to fill those precinct committeemen and committeewomen slots as part of its election strategy. The campaign had sent out at least two e-mails to local supporter alerting them to the signup procedure.
Nothing in the Obama effort, however, seemed to target Molinaro.
Helm said his dissatisfaction with Molinaro is because she didn’t recruit a full slate of Democratic challengers for the offices that were on this year’s ballot and because of a drop in precinct leaders in the party, from 350 during his term to less than 200 today. “We still aren’t doing what a good party does; recruiting good candidates and running those candidates,” Helm said.
I have not been able to reach Molinaro for comment. I’ll post it here when I do.
Democrats who work behind the scenes bemoaned the ouster.
“I’ve never seen anybody work so hard and get so much done and accomplish so much,” consultant Mitch Kates said. “If that is truly what happened, then it shows how their personal agendas are ahead of the party. That’s somebody’s personal agenda, and it’s sad.”
That leaves the Pinellas Democrats again on the verge of factionalism, just as their greatest chance for a Democratic president in eight years comes barreling toward them.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, we take pride in presenting a thoughtful address by Mr. Ronald Reagan:”
This just in from USF:
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. kicks off USF Lecture Series Sept. 4
TAMPA, Fla. (Aug. 26, 2008) – The University of South Florida’s University Lecture Series (ULS) commences with political speaker and activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and continues with a stellar line-up featuring an eclectic range of public figures.
Kennedy will speak on the topic “Our Environmental Destiny,” Sept. 4, 7 p.m. in the new Marshall Student Center Ballroom on the Tampa campus.
Author of the 2004 Crimes Against Nature, Kennedy is a highly sought-after speaker. He serves as chief prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper and is president of the Waterkeeper Alliance . Both organizations seek to protect local waterways.
Other speakers during the coming academic year are:
• Dr. Drew Pinsky , Oct. 8 7 p.m. – “Loveline With Dr. Drew”
• Kelly & Becca , Oct. 21 7 p.m. – “Let’s Talk About it” (Free)
• Ben Stein , Nov. 5, 7 p.m. – “Ben Stein on Life”
• Austin Gutwein, Nov. 6, 4 p.m. – “Hoops of Hope ”
• Danny Glover & Felix Justice , Jan. 15, 2009, 7 p.m. - “An Evening with Martin and Langston”All ULS events are free for students with a valid USF ID, alumni and faculty pay $5 with a valid ID and the general public is admitted for $10 (unless otherwise noted). Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tickets are now on sale at the Marshall Student Center Ticket Office located on the first floor of the new Marshall Center. The ticket office only accepts credit or debit, no cash or checks. For more information visit: http://uls.usf.edu/.
OK, so I have my bag of Cheetos, bottle of pain reliever and a 1.75 liter of Luksusowa, let’s rock. The keynoter is former Virginia Gov. and multimillionaire Mark Warner (not the Warner who schtupped Liz Taylor) who is running for the US Senate.
But the main feature is HRC.
So while we wait for her speech in the 10 p.m. hour, I start the ball rolling by asking: What will she say and/or what should she say?
Tonight and Thursday night I will open a thread for us to blog along with the TV coverage of the goings-on in Denver. So if you are watching and want to chime in, feel free.
Tonight it is Hillary Rodham Clinton’s turn. Will she forecefully endorse Obama? Will she be a fighter or warm and fuzzy (if that’s possible)? Will she get the job done? And if so, for whom, herself or her party’s nominee?
I will open the blogging at about 9 p.m. See you there.
Bonus cut: Tonight’s podium schedule follows the jump (remember the local times are two hours behind our EDT here in Tampa Bay) (more…)
Our fave former Times critic-Ronda Storms’ mockin’-coffee shop owner-former Weekly Planet contributor Gina Vivinetto takes the Newseum to task after a visit in which she found very little evidence of the alternative press. Here’s a sample:
The alternative weekly [industry] was summed up behind a glass display with exactly one cover of the Village Voice and a paragraph saying alt-weeklies were born in the turbulent 1960s to cover news outside of the mainstream press.
That’s it! It made me sad for the men and women who made their live’s work at alt-weeklies. Apparently, you weren’t really in the business of news distribution. Oops!
Damn. I feel so, well, useless now.
Of course, I am leaving aside the issue of just who in their right mind would even go to a museum devoted to the dying industry of the news.
The Democrats kicked off their four-day Obama infomercial with family night, a series of speeches aimed at humanizing Obama. The most effective was Michelle Obama’s conversational and heartfelt account of her life, especially the family aspects with her brother, a star basketball player and current coach at Oregon State, Craig Robinson.
She told the DNC audience:
As you might imagine, for Barack, running for President is nothing compared to that first game of basketball with my brother Craig.
I can’t tell you how much it means to have Craig and my mom here tonight. Like Craig, I can feel my dad looking down on us, just as I’ve felt his presence in every grace-filled moment of my life.At six-foot-six, I’ve often felt like Craig was looking down on me too…literally. But the truth is, both when we were kids and today, he wasn’t looking down on me – he was watching over me.And he’s been there for me every step of the way since that clear February day 19 months ago, when – with little more than our faith in each other and a hunger for change – we joined my husband, Barack Obama, on the improbable journey that’s brought us to this moment.
Simple and effective, laying the groundwork to humanize Obama a bit after the mock-heroicizing of him that the McCain camp has so successfully done over the past month.
Of course, the money shot of the night was the Lion in Winter, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., who took to the convention for probably the last time. He spoke for only about seven minutes, and those (like me) who were looking for parting wisdom from Teddy were disappointed. He stuck to the Obama story arc and handed the baton to Obama, and the crowd loved it. But what an opportunity for Kennedy to make sense out of the “dream” of the New Frontier and Camelot 40 years on, as well as the legacy of liberalism. But he got the job done, and those in the hall were clearly overcome with the emotion of the moment and the Ken Burns film that introduced him:
Here’s the vid of Kennedy speaking, introduced by Caroline Kennedy:
Bonus cuts: Joe Bardi has lots more convention goodness/weirdness over at The Short List; Mark Halperin grades the speakers; Jesse Jackson Jr. impresses.
Breaking new ground for campaign tomfuckery, Team McCain impresses with its genuine concern for the plight of Democrat Hillary Clinton:
Any chance that one of the 24-hour cable news weasels will get sucker-punched in the gut at this year’s Democratic National Convention?:
