The Political Whore

In my two decades in Tampa Bay, there have been three dominant Metro columnists at the Tampa Tribune: Steve Otto, Howard Troxler and Dan Ruth (who was on 1B for a while before being moved inside the A section and god knows where else).

So it is an indication of the Trib’s decline that two of those three now work for the rival St. Petersburg Times. And here is a weekly video segment with Ruth and Troxler discussing the ideas of the day, and it is surprisingly good (for two old print guys sitting in front of a camera, that is).

By David Warner, CL Editor and PoHo contributor

I’m an occasionally conflicted 24 fan. I’ve also been feeling a mix of outrage and doubt about the recent arrest of Youssef Megahed by U.S. immigration officials after he’d just been acquitted of criminal charges. So I tip my hat to Howard Troxler, whose column in today’s St. Pete Times tackles both Jack Bauer tactics and the confusions that surround the Megahed case. Read the rest of this entry »

When Disraeli said, “there are lies, damn lies and statistics,” he must have been referring to crime statistics, because if there is one set of numbers that are just outright lies, it’s the bullshit the St. Pete Police Department feeds us about crime being up or down. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a holiday tradition that this year gets a multimedia facelift, as St. Petersburg Times metro columnist Howard Troxler does his annual rewriting of old Christmas tunes to give them political themes. It worked much better in print, where we could sing them in our heads. Here’s the new version, however:

Not as good as the old days.

And has anyone else noted that Troxler very quietly retired his blog? Back in September he wrote on his blog, which was on hiatus at that time, that he was discontinuing his online presence:

There are several reasons, but the main one is that I want to spend more time on columns — in particular, more time away from the keyboard and in the world. What I found was that to do justice to the blog, I was spending a pretty good chunk of each day, then playing catch-up on column topics and research.