By Catherine Durkin Robinson PoHo contributor Catherine Durkin Robinson is a “feminist mother of twins” and a political blogger, working under the title Out in Left Field.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was questioned earlier this week about her views and how they compare/contrast with President Clinton’s views during a visit to the Congo. (The student meant to say President “Obama.” Right.)
By Catherine Durkin Robinson PoHo contributor Catherine Durkin Robinson is a “feminist mother of twins” and a political blogger, working under the title Out in Left Field.
When he speaks about the impact of captivity on the mammals, he doesn’t sound like a showboater, and what might seem like New Age-y talk about dolphin intelligence is pointed up with footage that left me haunted, too. That smile, says O’Barry, is nature’s greatest deception. Dolphins smile even when they’re crying on the inside.
Living in Florida, I am used to certain theme-and-water-park douchebaggery.
Comes with the heat, bugs, and old people driving 30-mph down the highway.
But there is something vastly disturbing about certain aquariums and water parks. And not only in Florida.
(Read the rest and see the film’s trailer after the jump)
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Aug. 12, 2009, at 2:03 pm
There is new video (a CNN feed from 10 Connects) from last week’s shoving and shouting match at the door to a town hall on health care reform featuring Congresswoman Kathy Castor in Ybor City. (h/t to Pushing Rope)
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Aug. 11, 2009, at 8:14 am
Somebody’s cranky…
(It turned out that the question was wrongly translated, but wow, is our Secretary of State a little fed up with Bill getting the lion’s share of headlines?)
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Aug. 10, 2009, at 2:04 pm
From Kansascity.com comes the tale you just knew would happen — an injured anti-Obama Town Hall protester is taking up collections to pay for his medical care because he lost his job and has no insurance:
Backers of Kenneth Gladney, 38, of St. Louis, gathered Saturday at the offices of the Service Employees International Union for an event organized by the pro-limited government Tea Party coalition.
The group claims union members attacked the politically conservative Gladney at the event two days earlier. But members of the union, which supports the president’s health care plan, say Gladney initiated the fight.
The melee, which ended in six arrests, was one of several at town hall meetings around the country as Democratic lawmakers returning home faced resistance to proposals to reform the nation’s costly health care system. U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan, a Missouri Democrat, organized the event in Mehlville.
Gladney’s attorney, David Brown, received cheers from the crowd of about 200 people when he read a statement written by his client.
“A few nights ago there was an assault on my liberty, and on yours, too.” Brown read. “This should never happen in this country.”
Brown told the crowd that Gladney is accepting donations toward his medical expenses. Gladney told reporters he was laid off recently and has no health insurance.
You can watch video of the attorney speaking for Gladney at the rally after the jump:
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 17, 2009, at 12:50 pm
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has a web-only ad out hitting Sarah Palin and Charlie Crist, among other Republicans, for “quitting” on their jobs.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 15, 2009, at 8:53 pm
Gays and straights alike carried red flags (a comment on a Media General exec who said the station viewed Speechless: Silencing Christians and “it didn’t raise any red flags”) and signs relabeling the NBC affiliate in Tampa Bay as News Channel H8 on Wednesday afternoon. More than 100 protesters gathered along Kennedy Boulevard in front of the station’s News Center to draw attention to the hate program that was aired for what they believe was $35,000 paid by a Christian group.
In a sign of political courage, Tampa City Councilman John Dingfelder attended the rally and said of News Channel 8’s decision,”This is not who Tampa is. This type of hate is just not acceptable in our community.” Dingfelder is running for a County Commission seat, a demographic that is much more to the right than the city of Tampa where he has served two terms.
Watch CL video coverage of the rally after the jump.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 13, 2009, at 1:54 pm
Rumproast.com put together this compilation of all of soon-to-be-ex Gov. Sarah Palin’s sighs, heavy breathing and other respiratory gasps during her crazy-sounding resignation newser. None are repeated and they are in their original order:
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 13, 2009, at 8:39 am
The season of slime starts early, and isn’t even that original, to tell you the truth. Haven’t we seen these same “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” parody attack ads in every elections since at least 2004? Didn’t we see similar ads trotted out against Vern Buchanan two years ago?
Either way, the shadowy 527 group Don’t Bank on Sink has released an Internet ad mocking CFO and governor candidate Alex Sink’s use of state airplanes.
Watch the entire ad and learn more about who’s behind the group after the jump.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 9, 2009, at 1:40 pm
Just getting back into the office today after six days off and getting caught up with stuff like this TV commercial from St. Pete mayoral candidate Deveron GIbbons. Yes, of course Charlie Crist is in the ad. As are Deveron’s parents. And footage of Deveron chatting with two old white ladies, evidence for nervous white St. Pete voters that it is all right to support a black candidate.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 24, 2009, at 2:13 pm
Love this story. Just love this story.
Soon-to-be-former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford first came up missing, then his staff explained that he was hiking alone on the Appalachian Trail, then earlier today came word she was cruising off the coast of Argentina. Now, the truth.
Yes, it’s another woman.
From CNN:
South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford admitted Wednesday, amid speculation over his whereabouts for the last several days, that he has been engaged in an extramarital affair with an Argentinian woman.
“I’ve been unfaithful to my wife,” Sanford told a news conference in Columbia, the state capital. “I developed a relationship with what started as a dear, dear friend from Argentina.”
His voice choking at times, Sanford apologized to his wife and four sons, his staff and supporters, and said he would resign immediately as head of the Republican Governors Association. The affair was discovered five months ago, Sanford said.
Watch the video of his admission from a live news conference after the jump:
I noticed it 30 years ago, when I began teaching. In my history class, students seemed to have little interest in the cast of characters until photography came along. Pictures changed the way we looked at history. We were never as interested in George Washington as were in Abraham Lincoln. It was because of those portraits of Lincoln, where we could look into his haunted eyes.
You can’t hide from pictures. The horrific video of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, bleeding out on a Tehran street not only makes the political upheaval in Iran more tangible, it also shows the power of new media. We don’t turn to television, toward any immaculately dressed network news anchor, to see these images. We click on YouTube and get handheld cell phone video from a helpless bystander.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 22, 2009, at 2:27 pm
OK, so this was shot long before former wrestler and Hillsborough politician Brian Blair’s arrest on child abuse charges this weekend, but we’re pretty sure here at PoHo Central that the always erudite Iron Sheik feels the same way about that “jabroni” Blair today as he did back in March.
Posted by Mitch Perry on Jun. 15, 2009, at 6:22 am
By Mitch Perry PoHo contributor and anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio.
For weeks, state and national political reporters have been anticipating that the Charlie Crist/Marco Rubio race for the Republican nomination for Senate in Florida next year will be a barn-burning battle between competing philosophies in the party.
That’s despite a poll released last week that shows the governor with an overwhelming lead in the match-up.
And now Rubio doesn’t necessarily have a hold on all those disaffected Republicans who think the Governor is too moderate for their tastes.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 11, 2009, at 11:01 am
Ouch. This one goes into the “I-don’t-know-whether-to-laugh-or-cry-or-both” file. Correspondent Jason Jones intones, “You guys are like a walking Colonial Williamsburg.”
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 3, 2009, at 7:52 am
While I appreciate the Gator sentiment in this House floor appearance by Jacksonville Congresswoman Corrine Brown, word that she is mulling a U.S. Senate bid makes me think that perhaps we might want a Senator who could actually read a simple congratulatory message.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 27, 2009, at 12:53 pm
Having just spent some time in the Florida Keys snorkeling a few reefs I have to say this is good news: a huge, decommissioned U.S. Navy vessel, the Hoyt S. Vandenberg, was sunk seven miles off the Key West shore to provide a new artificial reef.
After a decade of planning, it took less than two minutes Wednesday for the 522-foot USS Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg to sink as the Keys’ newest artificial reef. It was under water by 10:23 a.m. — held up 23 minutes by a sea turtle that needed time to swim out of the way.
The ship now rests in 140 of feet of water at 24.27 north latitude, 81.44 west longitude.
The former U.S. Navy and Air Force vessel, which sat in the government’s mothball fleet in Virginia from 1983 until she was moved to Key West in April, was towed to the scuttling site from her berth at the East Quay Wall just before 7 a.m. Tuesday.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 27, 2009, at 6:25 am
The first shot in the confirmation battle over Sonia Sotomayor is out there, a video appearance by the judge at Duke University in which, ABC News reported, she said that the district appeals court is where “policy is made.”
If that is true, that would make her an “activist” judge, a label that is radioactive and would create a real problem for Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court.
So what did she say, exactly? And what did she mean?
The left-leaning Media Matters defends her and says her words were taken out of context, that ABC (and others) erred in their characterizations. That spin is being echoed by Democrats on this morning’s news shows. It goes like this:
In fact, Sotomayor was responding to a student who asked the panel to contrast the experiences of a district court clerkship and a circuit court clerkship. Sotomayor’s remarks from the Duke panel discussion … :
SOTOMAYOR: The saw is that if you’re going into academia, you’re going to teach, or as Judge Lucero just said, public interest law, all of the legal defense funds out there, they’re looking for people with court of appeals experience, because it is — court of appeals is where policy is made. And I know — and I know this is on tape and I should never say that because we don’t make law, I know. OK, I know. I’m not promoting it, and I’m not advocating it, I’m — you know. OK. Having said that, the court of appeals is where, before the Supreme Court makes the final decision, the law is percolating — its interpretation, its application. And Judge Lucero is right. I often explain to people, when you’re on the district court, you’re looking to do justice in the individual case. So you are looking much more to the facts of the case than you are to the application of the law because the application of the law is non-precedential, so the facts control. On the court of appeals, you are looking to how the law is developing, so that it will then be applied to a broad class of cases. And so you’re always thinking about the ramifications of this ruling on the next step in the development of the law. You can make a choice and say, “I don’t care about the next step,” and sometimes we do. Or sometimes we say, “We’ll worry about that when we get to it” — look at what the Supreme Court just did. But the point is that that’s the differences — the practical differences in the two experiences are the district court is controlled chaos and not so controlled most of the time.
Watch the video clip after the jump, and you make the call:
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 20, 2009, at 12:26 pm
Here’s the latest tweak of our enormously popular governor, from his friends across the aisle in the Florida Democratic Party. It’s the first online ad with the “Cut and Run Crist” theme that the party has been drum-beating since Crist announced his Senatorial bid last week.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 19, 2009, at 10:00 am
He’s got plans this summer for vacation with his family, but the most interesting thing about speaking with St. Petersburg City Councilman Wengay Newton for our CL Summer Guide 2009 was hearing him talk about the old days, growing up in a large family that didn’t have a lot of financial resources (translation: money):
“It was eight of us with a single mom, so there wasn’t a lot of vacationing. We’d go to Busch Gardens … one or two of us, then we would come back and tell the rest how it was.”
Watch the full video of Newton and his summer vacation plans/memories after the jump.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 18, 2009, at 6:24 am
As part of our upcoming Summer Guide issue (on newsstands throughout Tampa Bay on Wednesday), we asked a lot of people in Tampa Bay about their vacation plans and memories. I’m going to run the political vacation videos here on PoHo, starting with St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker, who said:
I go to a place that’s kind of like a summer camp for families (in North Carolina). Every night they have either square dancing or some sort of music or karaoke in the big pavilion. For me, the cell phones don’t work, and I like that.
See the full video of Baker talking about how he rolls on vacation after the jump.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 13, 2009, at 2:17 pm
From the recent Florida Humanities Council “A Tale of Two Cities” forum featuring Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio and St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker, here are the two mayors answering the question: Who is your favorite mayor from your city’s past?
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 13, 2009, at 6:51 am
Here is a video that was the winner of The Congress for New Urbanism CNU 17 video contest, a film that looks at the connection between suburban sprawl and environmental degradation. From independent filmmaker John Paget.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 12, 2009, at 10:07 am
“Some politicians support trillions in reckless spending…” is one of the attack lines from the Marco Rubio campaign as it launches a full spread of phaser and photon torpedoes (yes, we’re staying with the Star Trek theme until the movie drops below $10m a week at the box office) at Charlie Crist just minutes after the governor declared his candidacy for the U.S. Senate.
The ad, predictably, ties Crist at the hip with President Barack Obama.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 5, 2009, at 6:15 am
It’s on like Donkey Kong: a battle for the heart and soul of the Florida Republican Party!
Conservative standard-bearer Marco Rubio has thrown his hat into the post-Mel Martinez 2010 U.S. Senate elections, setting up a likely battle royal with Gov. Charlie Crist that will be one of the national Republican Party’s highest profile battle between its conservative faction (Rubio, Jeb Bush) and its centrist, big-tent faction (Crist, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as examples).
Rubio made the announcement on the Spanish language Univision and followed up with a video on YouTube this morning.
Rubio says he wants a balanced budget amendment and pro-business laws. He also obliquely acknowledges the 800-pound GOP elephant in the room that is Crist: “I know that there are people more famous than I who will enter this race. But nothing in life worth doing is easy.”
