Posted by Mitch Perry on May. 18, 2009, at 6:01 am
By Mitch Perry
PoHo contributor Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio
When Marco Rubio declared his candidacy for U.S. Senate earlier this month, he said his campaign wasn’t “against anyone or anything.” On the Spanish language Univision Network, however, his tone was as different as the idiom, saying he was interested in combating “the kind of American Socialism that they want to establish in the U.S.”
Last Friday night in Tampa, I asked the former House speaker, who will compete head to head against Gov. Charlie Crist for the nomination to succeed Mel Martinez in the Senate next year, what exactly did he mean by that?
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 13, 2009, at 12:29 pm
President Barack Obama has reveresed himself on how open his Administration will be on the torture approved by the previous George W. Bush Administration of Horrors, refusing to release Abu Ghraib torture photos. Daily Dish reports:
In what can only be seen as a stunning reversal, the president is now refusing to release photographs that would help prove that the abuse and torture techniques revealed at Abu Ghraib were endemic in the Bush military. I can’t help but wonder if this is related to his decision to appoint Stanley McChrystal as the commander of his Afghanistan war and occupation. There is solid evidence that McChrystal played an active part in enabling torture in Iraq, and his activities in charge of many secret special operations almost certainly involved condoning acts that might be illustrated by these photos. The MSM has, of course, failed to mention this in their fawning profiles of McChrystal.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 12, 2009, at 10:07 am
“Some politicians support trillions in reckless spending…” is one of the attack lines from the Marco Rubio campaign as it launches a full spread of phaser and photon torpedoes (yes, we’re staying with the Star Trek theme until the movie drops below $10m a week at the box office) at Charlie Crist just minutes after the governor declared his candidacy for the U.S. Senate.
The ad, predictably, ties Crist at the hip with President Barack Obama.
Posted by Mitch Perry on May. 12, 2009, at 5:50 am
By Mitch Perry
PoHo contributor Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio
Democratic Party political strategist James Carville has published a new book out with the audacious title of “40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation.”
The first thought from any sensible person should be that the hyperbole is a little rich. If nothing else, political junkies don’t have to have a long memory to remember how Karl Rove fell off his petard with his (now ludicrous) proclamation about ushering in a” durable Republican majority” earlier this decade. That didn’t exactly work out that way.
Posted by David Warner on May. 10, 2009, at 11:33 am
Frank Gorshin in a 1969 "Star Trek" episode referenced by Dave Itzkoff.
In more proof that the blockbuster Star Trek movie has tapped into the zeitgeist, or at least the hype-geist, the Week in Review section in today’s New York Times includes three count ‘em three Trek-inspired stories. Surprisingly, only two out of three use the now-obligatory Obama-as-Spock trope.
• Columbia J-School prof and pop historian David Hajdu on Star Trek as “an early manifestation of our contemporary absorption with the pop culture of the past.”
• Dave Itzkoff’s “Ideas & Trends” piece on the socio/political climate of 1966 (when the TV series debuted) vs. that of 2009
• Maureen Dowd’s dream that Spock/Obama swoosh in and use the powers of logic to save newspapers. (I especially liked the ‘red matter’/'read matter’ pun, though it may work better if you’ve seen the movie.) Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 1, 2009, at 10:08 am
President Barack Obama addresses the American Tea Party rallies (and Fox News) by saying he welcomes a serious discussion of the issues and, specifically, how to pay for health care in this CNN clip.
Posted by David Warner on May. 1, 2009, at 1:25 am
National Public Radio’s intrepid Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg got there first on Thursday with the news that Justice David Souter, a mere youngster at 69 compared to some of the senior citizens on the highest bench, is nevertheless sick and tired of Washington D.C. and is headed back to New Hampshire at the end of the court’s current term. He’s confident, opines Totenberg, that the new prez will select a replacement in tune with Souter’s own moderate-to-liberal bent. She predicts Obama will pick a woman as Souter’s replacement, but says the choice won’t do much to change the court’s conservative bent.
The first 100 days of the president’s administration is usually used as a report card to judge its success or gauge where it might be for the rest of its term. However, the closing of President Obama’s honeymoon may not even be the news headline as reports of Arlen Specter switching parties overshadows the president. This completely arbitrary 100th-day-mark might underscore more the status of the Republican Party than anything else.
President Obama announced on Earth Day new initiatives to harness alternative energy including wind, solar, and ocean currents. During his speech, Obama made it clear that his new initiative was not only intended to address threats of climate change but could also create new jobs.
Now, the choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy. The choice we face is between prosperity and decline…. The nation that leads the world in creating new energy sources will be the nation that leads the 21st-century global economy.
It is refreshing to finally have a president who recognizes that “environmentally friendly” doesn’t mean “bad for the economy.” A video (after the jump) demonstrates how a green economy can actually create jobs. The new initiative will lease federal waters to harness wind and ocean currents as a renewable source of energy. These facilities must be designed, materials need to be bought, their construction needs to be contracted, staff needs to maintain it – all are positions waiting to be filled.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Apr. 22, 2009, at 12:53 pm
It’s not big news, in that we’ve known for some time that the Obama stimulus plan included money for governments and transit systems to upgrade their fleets to be more energy-efficient and alternative-fuel-oriented, but the administration used Earth Day to release some details about the $300 million addition to the Clean Cities program.
Here is the full text of the news release, after the jump:
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Apr. 14, 2009, at 11:28 am
President Barack Obama is giving a major economic speech at midday, reviewing what he has done about the economy in his first 12 weeks in office and why, a much more cogent argument for change and economic revolution than you will hear at any Tea Party tomorrow.
“It is simply not sustainable to have a 21st century financial system that is governed by 20th century rules and regulations that allowed the recklessness of a few to threaten the entire economy,” the president said. “It is not sustainable to have an economy where in one year, 40 percent of our corporate profits came from a financial sector that was based too much on inflated home prices, maxed out credit cards, overleveraged banks and overvalued assets; or an economy where the incomes of the top 1 percent have skyrocketed while the typical working household has seen their income decline by nearly $2,000.”
Obama then turned to the Bible for an analogy.
“There is a parable at the end of the Sermon on the Mount that tells the story of two men,” he said. “The first built his house on a pile of sand, and it was destroyed as soon as the storm hit. But the second is known as the wise man, for when “…the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house…it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.
“We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand. We must build our house upon a rock. We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity – a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest; where we consume less at home and send more exports abroad.”
He called for more scientists and engineers and fewer financial pencil-pushers and manipulators, as well as a transition to a clean-energy carbon emissions cap. And Obama said people who focus on cutting “a few earmarks” or slashing the National Endowment for the Arts misses the bigger picture, that the deficit is driven by entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare. Changing the health care system, then, is crucial to a long-term solution.
And he rightly puts some blame on the culture in Washington and the media’s shortening attention span. “For too long, too many in Washington put off hard decisions for some other time on some other day,” he said. “There’s been a tendency to score political points instead of rolling up sleeves to solve real problems. There is also an impatience that characterizes this town – an attention span that has only grown shorter with the twenty-four hour news cycle, and insists on instant gratification in the form of immediate results or higher poll numbers … instead of confronting the major challenges that will shape our future in a sustained and focused way.”
Maybe because it happens so infrequently, but it seems that every time a Democrat gets elected President, Americans of a certain persuasion get psyched that maybe marijuana use could become legalized.
Jimmy Carter was considered to be a reformer regarding the herb, but he quickly disabused Americans of that notion when he endorsed the Mexican government’s use of the herbicide paraquat on marijuana fields in Mexico in 1977.
Bill Clinton infamously smoked but didn’t inhale in his halcyon days, and of course, Barack Obama infamously admitted in his first memoir Dreams of My Father that in his confusing days in high school, “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it.”
But when asked about legalizing pot at his town hall Internet meeting last month, the president was quick to dismiss such thoughts, saying he had no intention of doing so.
By Alexandra Koutsogiannopoulos
PoHo Contributor
Alex is the program director for the United Nations Association-USA’s Tampa Bay Chapter and is an occasional guest on the Political Whore podcast.
President Barack Obama recently outlined his plan for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The following is a brief report of his statements about what he wants to do:
In announcing a plan on Friday that could be his signature foreign policy effort, Mr. Obama said that he would send more troops — some 4,000 — but stipulated that they would not carry out combat missions, and would instead be used to train the Afghan Army and the national police.
… Mr. Obama framed the issue as one that relies on one central tenet: protecting Americans from attacks like the one that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Mar. 26, 2009, at 12:24 pm
More money is trickling down from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, as the Barack Obama White House today announced Florida is getting more than $160 million for greening up the state. Tampa gets $3.7 million; St. Petersburg gets $2.3 million, and other Tampa Bay governments likewise are getting millions.
Posted by Mitch Perry on Mar. 23, 2009, at 3:05 pm
By Mitch Perry
PoHo contributor Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio.
Last Friday afternoon’s soaring (and dizzying) deficit numbers produced by the Congressional Budget Office were the last thing the Obama administration needed. Between that and what can only be labeled bailout fatigue that has exploded after the AIG debacle, there is a fear that one of the President’s most ambitious and far reaching goals of his presidency – reforming health care – could be on life support before the specifics of the plan are already announced.
By Alexandra Koutsogiannopoulos
PoHo Contributor
Alex is the program director for the United Nations Association-USA’s Tampa Bay Chapter and will be an occasional guest on the Political Whore podcast.
I thought that my first post on here should be an introduction to me: who I am, where I came from and why you should give a damn….!
I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. First generation Greek-American, both of my parents immigrated to the United States individually: my father came here after completing medical school in Greece and my mother came here when she was still in elementary school when her parents came here to start a new life.
I stayed in Ohio only for four years before my parents loaded up the Toyota and drove down to Florida where all the other relatives had moved to. Greek families tend to move in herds…like wildebeests…and when one of them finds a new spot to “graze” the rest of the herd follows. We ended up in Orlando, in a community which was all cow pasture and roads going nowhere: Hunter’s Creek. In the past 6 years or so the area has boomed into a huge Westchase-eque type area.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Mar. 20, 2009, at 6:11 am
OK, so the Special Olympics joke bombed, prompting a White House clarification and apology. But the rest of President Barack Obama’s historic appearance on late night television Thursday was easy sledding.
“The president of the United States is here,” Tonight Show host Jay Leno said in prepping the audience, as if they didn’t already know. The rest of the interview was just like a soft-rock radio station: soft and easy. This from Joe Garofoli in the San Francisco Chronicle:
If this is what the interviews on Leno’s new 10 p.m. show is going to be like, politicians are going to be lining up for a turn wacking softballs out of the batting cage. This was the first time that a sitting president had showed up on a late night show, but Leno’s first few “questions” according to the transcript included the word “Wow” a lot.
Wow.
Not a lot of news to be made here. Obama appeared relaxed and confident, and got off the best lines. “In Washington it’s a little bit like ‘American Idol,’ except everybody is Simon Cowell.”
The debate over Florida’s public campaign financing program turned ugly Thursday when Republican Sen. Ronda Storms mocked President Barack Obama as “The Messiah” and a Democratic colleague made a vulgar retort.
It didn’t escalate beyond that, and they agreed that voters should be able to decide whether to get rid of the program that gave statewide candidates more than $11 million in taxpayer money during 2006 elections.
She was criticized by Pasco Republican Mike Fasano after saying this:
“People in Florida also voted for the president, who said he would stick with public financing and then failed to keep his word and didn’t honor his word, and the public then yawned about it and said, ‘It’s not a big issue,’” Storms said.
She then took a swipe at Democrats and Obama.
“They don’t want to talk about The Messiah having a flaw, but actually it was a flaw,” she said.
Posted by Mitch Perry on Mar. 10, 2009, at 6:00 am
By Mitch Perry
PoHo contributor
Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio.
As the Dow Jones Industrials and the S&P 500 continued their dismal descent last week, conservative commentators appeared proud that they alone have deciphered the reason why – it’s President Obama’s economic proposals, of course.
From the Wall Street Journal’s lead editorial on Friday:
What’s worrying about the plunge in equities since January 2, and especially in the last week since Mr. Obama released his radical budget, is that it has come amid the unveiling of the President’s policy agenda. Equity prices have reacted to those proposals by signaling that they expect a much deeper and longer recession.
It’s hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president’s policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.
And so on. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly led off virtually every one of his “Talking Points” segments by also blaming the president’s “Socialist spending sprees” as further evidence that Wall Street is not impressed.
But is this really correct? One political theorist laughed when I asked him this last week.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Mar. 3, 2009, at 11:24 am
The White House today is touting new estimates on job creation from the stimulas bill by the end of 2010. That’s $28 billion worth of asphalt-layin’, engineerin’, project managin’, right-of-way buyin’ work.
Florida gets $1.3 billion of that, with $52 million of the state’s share going to the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, the second-biggest allocation after Miami.
The administration’s press release from today is after the jump.
Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio. This is his first post as a PoHo contributor.
Perhaps because of the mind blowing dollars attached to his policy prescriptions to change the country, President Obama’s announcement last Friday that he will withdraw all combat forces from Iraq by next summer and all remaining U.S. troops by the end of 2011 hardly registered as a momentous event on the national scene.. That is, if you go by the measure of how the D.C. press corps addresses news emanating from the Obama administration, which sometimes seems to be viewed through the prism of “How pissed are Congressional Republicans about it?”
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Feb. 24, 2009, at 9:30 pm
Credit: Whitehouse.gov
From the White House, as Barack Obama speaks:
Excerpts of the President’s address to the joint session of Congress tonight:
We have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election. A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.
Well that day of reckoning has arrived, and the time to take charge of our future is here.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Feb. 24, 2009, at 7:36 am
As President Obama preps for his first address to a joint session of Congress tonight at 9 p.m., the punditocracy is going wild with predictions and desires of what he will/should say. He’s catching heat for being a doomsayer so far instead of the hopeful candidate whose pop art depiction graced untold Hope posters. This is a tough speech for him: he must be hopeful and realistic at the same time. He must explain how his borrowing trillions of dollars from the Chinese squares with his desire to cut deficit spending. He has to roll out an austere budget proposal yet still pad it with social programs and safety-net spending that his party demands.
President Obama is benefiting from remarkably high levels of optimism and confidence among Americans about his leadership, providing him with substantial political clout as he confronts the nation’s economic challenges and opposition from nearly all Republicans in Congress, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
A majority of people surveyed in both parties said Mr. Obama was striving to work in a bipartisan way, but most faulted Republicans for their response to the president, saying the party had objected to the $787 billion economic stimulus plan for political reasons. Most said Mr. Obama should pursue the priorities he campaigned on, the poll found, rather than seek middle ground with Republicans.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Feb. 22, 2009, at 2:54 pm
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist! Simply because Jindal’s jingoism of “conservative alternative solutions” falls flat after eight years of that crap not working.
Here’s the MTP interviews with Crist and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, done separately.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Feb. 20, 2009, at 3:35 pm
Are we witnessing the birth of a new Lou Dobbs, or is the viral emergence of Rick Santelli on the mortgage assistance plan just a casw of the upper-class twits being openly pissed at the lower-class dummies?
Or is it worse: another example of how Web 2.0 endlessly recycles anything that has the same rubber-necking appeal as a good interstate highway car crash? (Let’s not forget that some of the most consistently popular online videos features kitties.)
By now it is pretty safe to say you cannot have missed the hubub about CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli inducing a “riot” on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. OK, it wasn’t a riot, it was a few traders who are doing OK financially, as is Santelli, all bitching about the mortgage assistance plan announced by President Barack Obama this week.
Viral Video Chart says the Santelli Tea Party clip has been added to 255 blogs (256 as soon as I hit the publish button) and had more than 220,000 views in the past day.
Let’s go to the video for those who missed it and those who can’t get enough of it.
The Columbia Journalism Review, natch, displays its disapproval:
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Feb. 19, 2009, at 5:51 pm
The Republican Party’s anti-Obama stimulus gambit appears not to be paying off. A poll by AP/GfK shows the public widely is siding with Obama and Democrats in Congress on the economic recovery plan — and panning the GOP.
Obama’s approval rating on the economy is 68 percent. The Democrats in Congress get a 49 percent approval, while Congressional Republicans score only 33 percent approval.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Feb. 17, 2009, at 11:46 am
As Barack Obama signs the $787 billion economic stimulus plan that could likely define this term in office (and determine whether he gets a second), the White House marketing department and its proxies are busy selling it to the Amnerican public.
The bottom line, according to the White House and its economic advisors, is that the legislation’s spending provisions will create or save 206,000 jobs in Florida, second only to California (396,000) and Texas (269,000).
These are only estimates, the White House explains:
The estimates are derived from an analysis of the overall employment impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act conducted by Christina Romer, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, Chief Economist for the Vice President, and detailed estimates of the working age population, employment, and industrial composition of each state.
The full state-by-state list can be downloaded here.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Feb. 16, 2009, at 4:47 pm
Sure, sounds like the new president hasn’t lived up to the seven vows in this speech. They are, as posted with this video:
1. Make Government Open and Transparent [PoHo: OK, it's too early in his administration to tell.]
2. Make it “Impossible” for Congressmen to slip in Pork Barrel Projects [the stimulus bill was certainly a failure of this promise]
3. Meetings where laws are written will be more open to the public (republicans shut out)
4. No more secrecy
5. Public will have 5 days to look at a Bill [PolitiFact agrees he broke this promise.]
6. You’ll know what’s in it (Republican Senators didnt know)
7. We will put every pork barrel project online
Posted by Scott Farrell on Feb. 13, 2009, at 8:45 am
By Scott Farrell
PoHo contributor
Scott Farrell is the host of The Scott Farrell Show weeknights from 9 – 11 pm on NewsTalk AM 820 WWBA.
Darwin has been vindicated by a former foe.
You intelligent designers or unintelligent designers – as the case may be – no longer have a friend in the Governor’s Mansion in Tallahassee. Charlie Crist proved again Monday that Darwin was correct 150 years ago when he put forth his theory of natural selection, or at least as it pertains to political evolution. Crist clearly has an innate sense of the political peacock with the most ornate poll numbers. That’s why the Governor couldn’t stop himself from jumping on his Flying Beagle and heading down to Fort Myers. As Fox News ran the clip of Gov. Crist introducing President Obama – the groans emanating from Men’s Grills in country clubs from Palma Ceia to Naples were palpable: “Say it ain’t so, Charlie.”
Charlie has ditched the Jebfords (think male Stepfords – identical bad jokes, argyle socks and oversized Rolexes) for the Lehigh Acres foreclosure crowd. But why? Because Crist’s political DNA knows if he doesn’t make this move his political future may end up deader than the future of Northwest Florida State College.
So did the Governor believe all the stuff he said as a state senator in the 1990’s? It is remembered by many Floridians as the Chain Gang Charlie Era. It’s not Charlie’s choice to make. He’s part of Darwin’s natural selection plan. And currently the political peacock with the best tail feathers is Barack Obama.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Feb. 12, 2009, at 4:43 pm
Sen. Judd Gregg today shockingly pulled out as the Commerce Secretary nominee, blaming “irresolvable conflicts” in ideology with President Barack Obama, who had reached out across the aisle to nominate the N.H. Republican.
“…It has become apparent during this process that this will not work for me as I have found that on issues such as the stimulus package and the Census there are irresolvable conflicts for me,” Gregg said in a written statement released by his Senate office. “Prior to accepting this post, we had discussed these and other potential differences, but unfortunately we did not adequately focus on these concerns. We are functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of policy.
“Obviously the President requires a team that is fully supportive of all his initiatives,” Gregg said.
It reminds me of a saying that I first heard back in the 1980s when I was covering the Pinellas County Commission and the legendary Chuck Rainey. We were discussing efforts to broach a disagreement over water with Hillsborough County that had gone awry, and he said, “We held out an olive branch, and they beat us with it.”
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Feb. 11, 2009, at 1:49 pm
Time for a little audio fun with the 44th President of the United States.
Sure, Obama’s audiobook for Dreams of My Father has been out for some time, as has this audio. But it is flying around the Internets pretty heavy this week (found my 18-year-old son playing them last night when I got home from work), so it seems appropriate to share. First, a little back story from the April Winchell blog:
If you’ve ever read President Obama’s Dreams From My Father, good for you. I couldn’t get past the foreword.
I wish I had. Because today I discovered that there’s a fairly juicy little subplot in the book, involving one of Obama’s high school friends.
Ray, a fellow classmate of Obama’s, was also bi-racial, and also trying to define himself. But what set him apart was his colorful manner of self-expression. Ray cursed like a motherfucker.
This would all be snickerworthy enough, but it turns out that Obama actually read the audiobook version of Dreams From My Father.
So here you go, enjoy and use them in good health (audio after the jump, and far too many h/t’s to mention but shoutout to Pushing Rope):
The Obama administration on Tuesday overturned another Bush-era energy policy, announcing it was setting aside a draft plan to allow drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
“To establish an orderly process that allows us to make wise decisions based on sound information, we need to set aside” the plan “and create our own timeline,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced in a statement.
Alleging that the Bush administration “had torpedoed” offshore renewable energy, Salazar said he was extending the public comment period by 6 months and ordering his experts to compile a report on the Outer Continental Shelf’s energy potential – not just oil and natural gas, but also renewables like wind and wave energy.
Democratic Party political strategist James Carville has published a new book out with the audacious title of “40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation.”
President Obama announced on Earth Day new initiatives to harness alternative energy including wind, solar, and ocean currents. During his 
I thought that my first post on here should be an introduction to me: who I am, where I came from and why you should give a damn….!
