The Political Whore

By Mitch Perry
PoHo contributor
Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio.

Last Saturday in Brandon’s Clayton Park, approximately 200 citizens gathered for a TEA Party (Taxed Enough Already) organized by conservative activist Terry Kemple, and featuring a rally-the-troops speech by State Senator Ronda Storms (right).

It was one of what was supposed to be over 1,000 such expressions of outrage at government spending under the Obama administration around the country on Independence Day, and followed a similar outburst of conservative sentiment at the first “Teabag” parties held on Tax Day, April 15th.

That day was also dedicated to federal largesse, though you may recall it more as a media battle between the seeming outright advocacy of the Fox News network, and the derision of it by more liberal commentators, including way too many allusions to what the phrase ‘teabagging’ meant. (This Keith Olbermann bit was just part of that onslaught.)

The growing federal deficit was on the minds of most of the citizenry. Despite the fact that a large part of the current deficit can be laid at the feet of former President George W. Bush (as my previous column, referring NY Times columnist David Leonhardt, can attest to), those in attendance on Saturday were of no mind to hear such specific facts. Read the rest of this entry »

Our own Ronda Storms is back in the headlines for her motormouth, this time for calling Barack Obama “The Messiah.”

The AP reports:

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.

Read the AP report in TBO.com.

UPDATE: Kenneth Quinnell takes apart Storms’ lies during the hearing, which he says most media overlooked.

As rumors swirl about whether she’ll seek re-election in 2010, our fave headline-grabbing winger Ronda Storms is taking on the menace that is the library book classification system known to anyone who ever went to public school as the Dewey Decimal System. This just in from the Trib:

Storms, R-Valrico, railed against the book-cataloging system during a budget hearing on state library aid, calling the Dewey Decimal System “anachronistic,” costly and just plain frustrating.

The system requires training for both staff and users, she complained. If Barnes & Noble organizes its books more simply, why can’t libraries?

“A lot of little old librarians are going to have a heart attack that I even said that out loud,” Storms said during Wednesday’s hearing. “But it really is ridiculous.”

Of course, the classification system is the official system of the Library of Congress and would be very costly to replace in Florida, state officials caution. That probably won’t stop Storms.

The Florida Senate voted 21-17 today to approve a

law that has been (deceivingly) titled the

“Evolution Academic Freedom Act.” SB 2692 by our own right-wing fave Sen. Ronda Storms opens the door for the teaching of creationism as scientific theory in public schools.

The Tampa Bay area senators voting for the bill were Mike Fasano, J.D. “Let’s pave all of Polk County” Alexander and Victor Crist, all Republicans. Democrats Arthenia Joyner and Charlie Justice and Republican Dennis Jones voted against it.

An attempt to amend the bill today by requiring instead “a thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution” failed. May God have mercy on our souls as the battle heads over to the even more socially conservative House of Representatives (although it appears the current House version is much more reasonable than the Senate’s, as it contains the same moderate language as the failed Senate amendment).

A rent-subsidized apartment complex in Belmont Heights, part of the East Tampa CRA, which would be impacted by Sen. Ronda Storms’ new legislation. (photo courtesy of tampagov.net)

The Times reports today that Sen. Ronda Storms has filed a bill that would make it tougher for cities across Florida to revitalize their decaying urban neighborhoods:

Storms, a Republican from Brandon, has proposed limiting to 15 years the life of special taxing districts intended to boost economic development in blighted areas. She also wants any district already in place for 15 years dissolved in 2009.

Such districts, called community redevelopment areas, redirect property taxes raised in their borders toward improving infrastructure and the economy in the area. They typically remain in place 20 to 30 years.

“It takes some time to build up resources that can be used to cure some of the more significant blight conditions in a community,” said Mark Huey, Tampa’s manager of economic development.

The motivation, ostensibly, is to get those property taxes now locked up in CRAs returned to county governments. It is part of Storms’ and her allies’ longtime power struggle against the city of Tampa. It is SB 1528, for those keeping score.

In the past year, Hillsborough County leaders have locked horns with the city over several issues, from Jim Norman’s insistence that county paramedics have a shot at extra-hours jobs at Raymond James Stadium to the possibility of consolidating some city-county services. That last idea, a pretty good one, was scuttled by Iorio because of the county’s anti-gay stance, which (and now we come full circle) was initiated by then-County Commissioner Ronda Storms.

All of this is the result of the fact that city leaders lorded over the unincorporated county and county commission for years until suburban sprawl in the ’80s and ’90s saw so much population growth that the county ended up with three times as many residents as the city. In the power struggle that ensued (and continues today), fiscal and social conservatives came to dominate county politics, which Tampa’s political structure remained more ethnic and more progressive. I wrote about the phenomenon in 2006, and not much has changed since then:

It is about control. It is about who will run Hillsborough. It is about growth and increasing the raw numbers of voters.

It is all about power.

Few of Tampa’s urban power brokers realize the depth of dislike out in the ‘burbs and beyond for their brand of politics. For decades, Tampa and its downtown set called the shots for the entire county. Tampa’s mayor sat atop that heap.

But starting in the 1990s, a group of political activists in eastern and southern Hillsborough worked to change that mix. They knew that the Tampa political base had something they didn’t: access to money, and lots of it. Developers and captains of industry played their politics and elected officials who hewed to a pro-downtown line. Tampa, with its working-class ethnic population, also skewed more Democrat.

So, armed with computers that constantly ran voter statistics, fueled by money from a handful of key supporters to pay for intensive polling that showed how and why certain candidates won races, and aided by a national swing to the right in 1994, these activists were ready to level the playing field. They brought together a working coalition to support conservative suburban candidates: anti-impact fee advocate Ralph Hughes, fiscal conservative Sam Rashid and anti-abortion financier Lorena Jaeb, to name a few.

They tapped into a basic reality: Most suburbanites live outside the city of Tampa because they want to. They don’t like the city, with its urban ways, its ethnic flavors, its rundown sections and its too-exclusive, too-expensive neighborhoods.

They also realized much better than their city counterparts how to use grassroots support, mainly along social conservative lines.

And so slowly and surely — to paraphrase H.G. Wells — they drew their plans against Tampa.