Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 20, 2009, at 10:49 am
My guest co-host for this week’s HoCast is Seth Nelson, a Tampa lawyer who is running for the Tampa City Council in 2011 (for Linda Saul-Sena’s citywide seat; she is term-limited).
He is a former law clerk on the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals, so we look at how Sonia Sotomayor did in explaining her statement about policy being made at the appellate court level. Plus, we discuss Walter Cronkite’s death and how it shows what is wrong with today’s news media and ask ourselves whether Barack Obama’s health care reform effort is in trouble.
And between all those headlines, Seth talks about why he’s running for the Council and what his top priorities are.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 26, 2009, at 4:44 pm
Of the Big Six candidates for St. Petersburg mayor (Jamie Bennett, Kathleen Ford, Bill Foster, Deveron Gibbons, Scott Wagman and Larry Williams), the only one that I have not had a chance to have in the CL Studio was Williams — until now. The former St. Pete city councilman came in recently to tape his half-hour on the HoCast, talking about how to battle the city’s crime problems and whether he is behind the eight ball because he got into the race late.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 21, 2009, at 6:00 am
Ed.’s note: Brian and Taylor were kind enough to have me sit in on their food and wine podcast last week. I have to remember to have them to talk politics on my HoCast. Cross-posted from the Daily Loaf:
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 1, 2009, at 1:28 pm
Sonia Sotomayor with her kids nephews at a ballgame. She certainly will have to be alert for foul balls in the confirmation process. (photo courtesy of whitehouse.gov)
This week’s podcast breaks down the Sonia Sotomayor Supreme Court nomination with Tampa media lawyer David Snyder. We talk about her race-based rulings, her temperament, Rush Limbaugh and Tom Tancredo’s charges of reverse racism and whether judges really do/should make policy or not.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 4, 2009, at 1:41 pm
In my continuing series of interviews with St. Petersburg mayoral candidates, Deveron Gibbons today stepped into the plush West Tampa studios of Creative Loafing to cut a half-hour podcast interview with me. With his political consultant Adam Goodman listening in, Gibbons talked about how he feels about the St. Pete Police Department (historically, it has made great strides, he said) and the impression by skeptics that he doesn’t have the gravitas to be mayor.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Apr. 27, 2009, at 2:31 pm
Craig PIttman — shown above, right — and Matthew Waite (and I’m going to use a technical journalistic term here) are the bomb. The St. Petersburg Times duo have literally written the book on Florida’s bulldozing of vital wetlands in Paving Paradise:Florida’s Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss, their new book that grew out of a series of stories in the Times.
Brilliant stuff, from the narrative history of how Florida was dredged-and-filled (yes, I grew up on one of those finger islands off the New River in Fort Lauderdale, so I know all about it) to the computer analysis of satellite photos that (for the first time) documented the loss of 84,000 acres of wetlands to construction since 1988. As Waite points out in the podcast interview, that is a land mass the size of the city of St. Petersburg.
You can buy the book lots of places, but one good indie bookstore where you can find it is Inkwood Books in South Tampa. It is a must-read. Just as this podcast with the authors is a must-hear.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Apr. 26, 2009, at 7:49 pm
I’ve lined up two great journalists, Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite (Pulitzer Prize-winning Matt Waite) of the St. Petersburg Times to come in Monday morning to talk about their book, Paving Paradise:Florida’s Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss. The podcast of our chat will be No. 7 in the Political Whore podcast series (Poho Podcast, or HoCast if you’re nasty) and should be up for your listening pleasure by Monday afternoon.
Let me know if you have any specific questions I need to pose to them about their book, Florida’s wetlands and the knuckleheads in the state Legislature who obviously haven’t read the book.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Apr. 20, 2009, at 12:13 pm
This week I was joined by ABC Action News anchor Brendan McLaughlin and Democratic consultant Ana Cruz. We discussed, according to my pre-production notes and links:
Is Obama a wimp? The NYT questions Obama’s determination for a good fight and details how he has compromised and capitulated. And is Obama too enamored with being on TV and being a star and not enough on producing the change he promised? What about this handshake with Hugo Chavez? http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/us/politics/19lobby.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Apr. 6, 2009, at 5:00 am
On the Friday after his Hillsborough County Commission voted 7-0 to start the ball rolling for a 2010 sales-tax increase referendum to pay for transportation improvements, Commissioner Mark Sharpe sat down for the HoCast recording session to talk about how we must embrace better mass transit, including light rail.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Mar. 31, 2009, at 6:02 am
The HoCast this week is devoted to an interview with St. Petersburg mayoral candidate Bill Foster, and we talk about everything from the police department, the broken-window theory of crime, high-speed chases, budget cutting and, of course, that infamous “creationism” letter he sent last year to the Pinellas School Board.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Mar. 24, 2009, at 6:44 am
The weekly Political Whore Podcast (the “HoCast”) is ready for your enjoyment. We had a great session that started off with a listen to the Free Republic’s Kristinn Taylor exhort the patriots at the Orlando Tea Party this weekend.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Mar. 19, 2009, at 12:19 pm
My series of in-depth interviews with the candidates for mayor in St. Petersburg continues this week with City Councilman Jamie Bennett. Here is an excerpt from my print story:
CL: What’s wrong with the police department?
Bennett: Every police department on the globe has issues. So what is wrong? We can spend plenty of time on what is right. What we have are challenges. There is no greater detriment to going forward as a city if people do not feel safe, so your police dept has to be led by people that get it. The city council stepped forward in two particular veins, when we did the police study we immediately began having two good years of adding policeman so that we can reach our authorized strength of 540, which is an awesome consideration in this budgetary crisis year. The other is that we need a police chief that communicates. When Chuck Harmon came to city council, we said please tell the community that — and the police — that they’re doing a good job.
Can Chief Chuck Harmon be that communicator, or would you be looking to make a change at police chief?
There will be no changes going into the transition period. That’s just crazy to think that you’re going in to eliminate this position or that. Chuck is trying very hard. He’s everywhere; you can’t shut the guy up now. He’s doing what we asked him to do. Chuck Harmon is the police chief until such time as we find somebody else, but that certainly is not a priority going into it.
Listen to the entire interview with Jamie Bennett here:
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Mar. 16, 2009, at 2:39 pm
Former Tampa Tribune reporter and LakelandLocal.com blogger Billy Townsend joined me and Alexandra Koutsogiannopolous, a friend of mine from poli sci grad school at USF and the director of programs at the Tampa Bay chapter of the United Nations Association-USA, for our weekly ‘HoCast taping today. Here are the results.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Mar. 13, 2009, at 3:11 pm
Perfect for that long walk on the Bayshore or biking on the Pinellas Trail, it’s me and WMNF Evening News anchor Mitch Perry breaking down politics for you.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Mar. 10, 2009, at 7:00 am
WMNF Evening News anchor Mitch Perry and I taped the second PoHo podcast (or “HoCast”) on Monday, a freewheeling discussion of two bummer subjects (the stimulus and job losses) and one fun (IKEA and its scary hold on its fans).
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Mar. 4, 2009, at 9:47 am
I’m kicking off my series of 30-minute interviews with the top St. Petersburg mayoral candidates today with a chat with Kathleen Ford. Here is an excerpt from the Q&A:
CL: Why run now?
Ford: We have experienced some incredible changes here locally, and the concern I have is the city finances, frankly. We have a current city policy that has allowed the gambling of our payroll. A lot of folks really don’t know about that yet, and i think there will be more in the press as more of the information is revealed as to what those policies were and what the ramifications were to the city of St. Petersburg.
How did the city do that?
There’s a concept called securities lending, and basically, the city had 39 loans out for $194 million of our operating revenue, and as you know, our operating budget general fund is approximately $200 million, more or less. So that’s the entire amount of our operational funds that were being allowed to be invested in some riskier investments, and we still have not seen publicly the report that was written by KPMG over a year ago [that audited those investments].
Do you suspect the city lost a lot of money in those investments?
$15 million to $30 million, and the fact that they can’t tell us how much is lost or where these funds are or how it happened is extremely troubling. …This is an additional layer of irresponsibility, carelessness and a lack of due diligence, and it still has not been addressed.
You can hear the entire interview in the cool little player on the top right hand side of this blog post or download it after the jump.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Mar. 3, 2009, at 6:00 am
Yes, there was something richly ironic about taping our very “new media” political podcast in what used to be Creative Loafing’s morgue, or where we kept all our newspaper print back issues. I should say, keep, because they are all still in there, some bound in red leather collections.
Ahh, the good old days.
But I love this podcast biz. For my first, I invited WMNF’s Mitch Perry and Democratic consultant Ana Cruz to throw around three of the biggest issues of the week: the economic recovery and whether the Florida Legislature will try to reject some stimulus dollars; Barack Obama’s timetable for withdrawal in Iraq, which has not pleased some on the far left; and Mayor Pam Iorio’s rail-transit dreams running into a bit of a buzzsaw at the Hillsborough County Commission. Plus, we listen to the sound clip of the week. I’ll give you a hint: it is from a well-known prescription drug abuser.
Listen and enjoy, and we’ll have a new one for you every week. Download
of time on what is right. What we have are challenges. There is no greater detriment to going forward as a city if people do not feel safe, so your police dept has to be led by people that get it. The city council stepped forward in two particular veins, when we did the police study we immediately began having two good years of adding policeman so that we can reach our authorized strength of 540, which is an awesome consideration in this budgetary crisis year. The other is that we need a police chief that communicates. When Chuck Harmon came to city council, we said please tell the community that — and the police — that they’re doing a good job.
