Posted by Mitch Perry on Aug. 10, 2009, at 6:38 am
By Mitch Perry PoHo contributor
Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio
Thursday night’s Town Hall Rally on health care with Congresswoman Kathy Castor in Ybor City has been dissected throughout the country thanks to YouTube.
The atmosphere both inside and outside of the Children’s Board was as intense and, at times, incendiary as the days after the presidential election in Florida in 2000. (I’ll never forget Day 3 of the 36-day recount in West Palm Beach, when I saw Democratic Congressman Robert Wexler sprint for safety into a trailer from incensed Republicans after finishing a live interview with then CNN anchor Greta Van Susteren).
Although the failure of both houses of Congress to vote on health care legislation before the August break was initially viewed as a loss of momentum for President Barack Obama, the fact is that the American public does need to sit and discuss what is in this once-in-a-generation legislation.
Unfortunately though, through the first week of the Congressional recess, the Town Hall format ain’t the place where that’s happening (and probably won’t , as more members of Congress can use footage of Tampa, St. Louis and Detroit to blow off further encounters).
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Aug. 7, 2009, at 6:35 am
The summer recess of Congress has sent politicians back home into their districts and straight into the guerilla theater that has overcome reasonable discussion about how to reform the nation’s broken health care system.
Witness: Hundreds of angry conservatives and anti-Obamacare people (a few violent) turned up at a town hall organized by state Rep. Betty Reed in Ybor City last night with one mission in mind — some with one mission in mind: disrupt the forum and get headlines.
They succeeded.
Driven by right-wing media nutz such as Rush Limbaugh (who mentioned Kathy Castor’ appearance at the forum during his Thursday radio show, bemoaning that she would be surrounded by “union goons”), the state and local GOP and Glenn Beck’s 9-12 movement, the anti-Obama crowd banged on windows and doors in an attempt to get into the overcrowded Children’s Board meeting room.
By Mitch Perry PoHo contributor
Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio
Last week, Lakeland State Senator Paula Dockery said she was seriously contemplating
a run for the Republican nomination for governor in 2010.
Apparently, she didn’t get the edict that party Chairman Jim Greer issued recently that all good Republicans should get behind Attorney General Bill McCollum’s candidacy.
But as far as Republican consultant (and soon to be PoHo contributor) Chris Ingram is concerned, Dockery’s possible entrance into the race is a good thing.
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.
Watching Rush Limbaugh’s address to CPAC on Sunday, I couldn’t figure out at first who he reminded me of. That morning, I had watched Karl Rove get owned by Katrina Vanden Heuvel on This Week and, for a moment, I saw a similarity between the two Republicans … the protruding foreheads, the same doughy skin, the similar anti-everything rhetoric. You’ll have to pardon me for mistaking the two. Except Limbaugh is a much larger man, and in that black-on-black wardrobe he wore at CPAC and with his larger-than-life mannerisms, Limbaugh reminded me of Orson Welles in Citizen Kane. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Luongo is a USF political science graduate student. He will be graduating this spring.
The idea of Rush Limbaugh filling the GOP’s power vacuum has dominated the media for the past month. The most obvious example was the TV ad paid by the Americans United for Change (AUFC), which claims that Republican senators are picking up their queues from Limbaugh.
The rationale for this ad, according to Brad Woodhouse, President of AUFC, is that “Limbaugh is the leader of the Republican Party. He says jump and Eric Cantor and other Republican leaders say how high.” To call Limbaugh the leader of the Republican Party is to lose the meaning of the word ‘leader’. He has no political power obviously, but as Fiore and Barabak from the L.A. Times put it, “Rush Limbaugh has his grip on the GOP microphone”.
The important question, however, isn’t how much influence Limbaugh has. His influence is apparent, especially now that CPAC honored him with the “Defender of the Constitution Award”. Assuming that he does have his finger on the conservative pulse, what we should ask is how Limbaugh will affect policies designed with the intention of “change,” and how will American respond to this.
The answer to this lies in the closing speech he gave to CPAC on Saturday.
Both my parents are lifelong Republicans who plan to vote for John McCain. Being raised by lifelong Reps, I took their beliefs as my own until I was into my 20s. (This was not a big positive for my social life in college.) I voted for Dole in 1996. (Yes, I can’t believe it either.) I voted for Bush in 2000 — a decision that has inspired nothing but shame since. In the early 2000s, my eyes opened to the world outside of the Conservative bubble and I didn’t like what I saw. Cribbing from Carlin, I now tell people that I was a Republican until I reached the Age of Reason.
Though we don’t “fight” about politics anymore, I still have “discussions” with my folks over the news of the day. This morning, during one such “discussion,” my mother brought up Barack Obama’s questionable citizenship. In fairness to her, she wasn’t insisting that Obama was a commie from Indonesia or other such nonsense. Apparently, there are lawsuits pending over the matter, and she asking me what I knew about it so she could form a more well-rounded opinion on the subject. Truth is, I hadn’t looked into Obama’s citizenship in months as I thought this was settled.
So, I did some research and wrote the following e-mail. (Yes, I really send e-mail like this to my parents.) I’m posting it here because I assume there are many young people out there who are having similar conversations with your parents or relatives who are McCain voters, and the following information might be useful to you. Enjoy!
Undeclared superdelegate and highest ranking African-American in the congress James Clyburn rips the Clintons for, among other things, being “hell-bound to make it impossible for Obama to win [in November].”
Rush Limbaugh dreams of “riots in Denver” during the Democratic National Convention. I dream of an undiscovered gas leak in Rush’s smoking room.
