For logistical purposes, CL has been consolidating its multiple blog platforms into one, and now it is The Political Whore’s turn to hang out the “We’re Moving” sign. It makes sense: we can’t use a common search engine among more than one blog right now. And we have to cross-post Green Community posts to both sites, to use just one example of content that fits into both blogs.

This will be the last post in this old blog site (Friday, August 21, 2009). Future PoHo posts will appear in our Daily Loaf blog, which also includes Green Community, arts, entertainment, sports, sex & love, film, TV and other pop culture posts.

You can read PoHo news pretty much the same way you read PoHo now, if you just want news & politics and not the rest of the Daily Loaf fare. Just change your bookmark from http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/politicalwhore/

to

http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/dailyloaf/category/politics/

And the RSS feed changes from http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/politicalwhore/feed

to

http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/dailyloaf/category/politics/feed

See you over at the Daily Loaf.

By Peter Schweitzer
PoHo contributor

We can now throw college coach Rick Pitino on the scrap heap of public figures undone by a sex scandal.

Pitino, a self-described devout Roman Catholic, has become embroiled in a sex scandal involving payola for an abortion. Of course, that’s not how Pitino’s lawyer describes it but that what’s going to stick. Six years ago, he had a tryst with Karen Sypher in a restaurant of all places. When confronted with the news that she was going to bear the fruit of his loins, Pitino offered her money “for health insurance.”

She says Pitino offered to pay for an abortion. Sypher describes the relationship as non-consensual and is facing extortion charges. Now, Pitino is fighting to save his job in Louisville.

None of this would be newsworthy if the coach hadn’t worn religion on his sleeve for so long. He portrayed himself as the family man, the devout Catholic. Now, he’s caught confronting the dirty truth about relations with a woman to whom he wasn’t married. Time to go to confession? Perhaps. Better yet, shut the hell up about your religious convictions and coach basketball! That’s what you’re paid to do. If the good people of Louisville wanted a sermon they can go to their local church. You created this mess by publicly professing your beliefs and your values. Now you have to live with the stark contradiction of reality.

So, what is Facebook Lite?

Depends on who you ask. Tech Crunch reports that it looks much like Twitter or FriendFeed:

Okay, while it seems that most of the users who are getting this message now are not seeing much different, earlier this week, it looks like a very select few may have gotten a sneak peak at Facebook Lite. According to their tweets on it, it appears to be a more Twitter-like. One user notes that it, “looks like a simplified version of twitter with comments enabled. On 2nd thought, it looks like simplified FriendFeed.”

That is of course very interesting since Facebook just bought FriendFeed for around $50 million yesterday.

Tech Crunch features this screen capture of Facebook Lite.

The Washington Post, however, says it ain’t Twitter-esque or FriendFeed-like:

But in reality, Facebook Lite has nothing to do with Twitter or FriendFeed ? at least, not right now. Instead, it was designed to be used in parts of the world where broadband speeds vary and can be expensive, we’re being told by Facebook. Given that the initial testing of it has taken place in India over the past several days, this makes sense.

Think about how slow Facebook is to load at times on some broadband connections here in the U.S., and just imagine what that much be like on connections that are several times slower. And then also consider that all of Facebook’s datacenters are here in the U.S. So for the data to get around the world, it creates an even longer natural load time. So Facebook is stripping the site back and allowing Facebook Lite to be a site where new users can quickly write on friend’s walls, send messages and build their social network. The basics.

As we said, it’s testing in India right now, but the plan is for Facebook Lite to hit places like Russia and China as well, we’re hearing.

Back when it started, TBO.com was a pioneering website, easy to navigate with lots of good info fed into it from a robust Tampa Tribune and WFLA-TV newsroom.

Today, 15 years after its birth, TBO.com is the growth engine on Parker Street for Media General, but it is a shadow of itself content-wise. It also uses video poorly (given all its access to video from owning the top-rated local TV station) and has an absolutely incomprehensible and unnavigable blog structure.

That hasn’t stopped its owners from celebrating, as this official statement crows:

August 11, 2009 –  Today, TBO.com celebrates 15 years of serving the Tampa Bay community online.   August 11, 1994 marked the first date of online publishing for TBO.com, making The Tampa Tribune one of the first newspapers in the nation with a dedicated news Web site.

… Today, TBO.com serves more than 3 million unique visitors each month with well over 20 million page views every month.  TBO.com recently introduced new interactive elements to its site including VIPIR Interactive Radar from Storm Team 8 allowing users to zoom down to street level and view storms just above their neighborhoods.   TBOsnap.com launched as the new user video submission tool, allowing Tampa Bay residents to record news and report it straight from their video cell phones via e-mail to myshots@tbosnap.com.  Also as a leader in mobile Web technology, m.tbo.com recently released news and weather videos on the iphone platform and is receiving record views from TBO mobile iphone users.

“The biggest change in 15 years has been the growth of digital news – first on the Web, and now on mobile and social networks. We’re proud of the team that’s dedicated to the success of this 24 hour news service and that continues to work every day to make us Tampa’s No.1 source for breaking news,” says TBO.com’s Content Director, Loren Omoto.

Another TV news personality has been urged not to have children. The twist is that this time it is a male anchor, not a woman.

For those not enamored of following Florida media insider baseball, you can bail out now. But for the rest of us media whores, there is a wonderful story that has been playing out for a week or so in Miami, where the ABC affiliate WPLG has fired one of its anchors who now claims it is because he is (gasp!) gay.

Charles Perez has fought back, with a sexual orientation discrimination complaint (which he claims triggered the firing) and a blog post in the Daily Beast in which he details his claims that station management was afraid of his increasing gay profile and urged him not to have children with his male partner. (The station, in written statements, denies Perez’s allegations.)

Perez writes:

Bottom line, I believe they sold me out as soon as my being gay became too widely known. It made them uncomfortable and made me, in their eyes, less advertiser-friendly. They’d demoted me two weeks earlier from main weekday anchor to weekend anchor. It was a move I quickly recognized was leading to the door, and I wasn’t prepared to watch my career circle down the drain.

My ex-employer will never admit this, but if the past decades have taught us anything, it is to be much more subtle about our prejudices. Getting rid of “the black guy” or “the woman” or “the gay guy” or “the Jew”—not to mention many other select groups—has given way to “we really should go in a different direction.” Or “we’ve really got to consider what’s the least objectionable choice.”

And he continues:

One of my colleagues, a higher-up at the station, told me: “The weekends will be better for you, anyway, Charles. You and Keith [my partner] want to have kids. It’s a lot less high-profile there.”

It was a suggestion that never would have been made to one of my straight colleagues, male or female. The only thing I could take from it was that my profile as a gay man, especially if I were to have kids and, God forbid, get married, would render me less promotable and less advertiser-friendly.

In fact, over the previous five months, I’d been told, “Don’t get married, Charles. We don’t need that.” I’d also been told not to have children. In essence: “You’re the main anchor and you’re gay, but let’s not push it.”

To me, having the family I want is not pushing it. Living with love, commitment, and dignity is not pushing it.

While today’s hearing about the rules and procedures for the bidding was given a pretty high-drama buildup in a 1B St. Petersburg Times story and in the Chicago Reader last week, it didn’t live up to its billing and was actually a complex, confusing, and undramatic court session.

Delano approved the negotiated set of bidding rules that was contested for two hours today, but she left some core issues unresolved and said, “I’ll make my ruling as to what the highest and best offer is” on Aug. 25.

If there was real news out of today’s hearing, it was that Creative Loafing CEO Ben Eason is considering stepping down temporarily to focus on formulating a new equity bid for the post-bankruptcy company.

“There is this big fight about [my] fiduciary obligations,” Eason said after the hearing. “It’s just a very tricky sort of thing.”

How tricky? So tricky that Eason, as the CEO of the debtor Creative Loafing, had one set of lawyers in court today who had negotiated and filed the bidding rules and sought Judge Delano’s approval. He also had another lawyer in court representing him and family members who would be part of the new equity bid, and that lawyer — for Eason (the bidder) — took issue with the bidding rules that Eason (the debtor) had OK’ed.

Eason said he has not made up his mind about stepping aside as CEO and did not have a timetable in mind for it.

But back to the equity auction for a minute.

To recap for those not living through the fun of this Chapter 11 for nearly the past year, it has come down to this: Two competing interests want very badly to own Creative Loafing post-bankruptcy. The first is Atalaya Capital Management, an Atlanta-based hedge fund that loaned $30 million to Creative Loafing in 2007 to finance the purchase of the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper and that, for fairly understandable reasons, isn’t real happy that it didn’t get repaid. On the other side is a coalition put together by Eason, his family and another CL investor, BIA Digital Partners, which lost $10 million in that same 2007 financing deal.

Here is a preview of the arguments both sides will make to Judge Delano at the Aug. 25 equity auction:

Atalaya will insist that the “highest return” for the company in the equity auction would be an all-cash bid, as it has already made in the amount of $2 million. It likely will question any in-kind considerations in the expected BIA-Eason Family bid, which could include free office rents valued at nearly $1 million. Atalaya will ask the judge to rule that cash is king in the bidding. “It’s what the creditors get … cash on the barrelhead,” he said. And the only creditors not envisioned being repaid in the current bids are Atalaya and BIA, so if bids rise and there is more money to repay those debts, that would be beneficial, Atalaya’s lawyer Tyler Brown argued.

Eason’s personal lawyer and a lawyer for BIA, however, said Delano must not allow Atalaya simply to bid up as much as it wants, under the theory that every dollar it puts in for equity it can take right back out to satisfy the unpaid portion of its owed $30 million. They argued it was “taking money out of one pocket and putting it another,” which would not be in the best interests of the newspaper chain going forward. They labeled it “credit bidding.”

“This is a hedge fund,” Eason said outside the courtroom. “The question is are they really going to operate the business? This is just a financial deal for them. We’re prepared to run it for the long term.”

Atalaya, during hearings earlier this year, also said it plans to operate the business as a news media company and has a management consultant lined up. It also said it would make an additional $1 million line of credit available to the new CL if it is the successful bidder, for operational needs. “We’ve committed some real money here,” Brown said in court.

In the meantime, you can download the proposed rules and procedures in .pdf.

Because we just can’t get enough of her, the farewell speech of (now former) Alaska Gov. and Head GOP Whacko Sarah Palin is on full display on the interwebs, first off with this link to stunning interpretation of the Republican grande dame’s verbiage, as performed on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien by “master thespian” William Shatner.

Full video after the jump:

Then, Vanity Fair editors give Palin a hand by red-penciling her speech script in a desperate attempt to have it make sense:

Here’s St. Petersburg Times Editor, CEO and Chairman Paul Tash vs. Daniel Tosh in our unabashed ripoff feature, Separated at Birth: