It’s been said silence is golden - and deafening, too!
You could say, state Sen. Ronda Storms, R- You’re Alllllll Going To Hell!!!, has been hoisted on her own tongue.
Storms was being confronted last week on the Senate floor over her disingenuously titled “Academic Freedom Act,” which is little more than a ham-handed effort on her part to eventually wheedle the teaching of so-called “Intelligent Design” into the state’s biology classrooms, which just this year were allowed to enter the 21st Century to start teaching the settled science of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.
The Tug-Boat Annie of the Bible has denied in the past that her bill was indeed a stalking horse for the wizard-in-the-sky “Intelligent Design” advocates and it certainly would have been easy enough to merely restate her dubious position for the sake of her fellow senators.
Yet when she was asked repeatedly no fewer than four times by her colleagues whether, quite simply, the intent of her “Academic Freedom Act” (hardy-har-har) would allow science teachers supposedly teaching science to instead also teach “Intelligent Design” each time Maybelline’s worst nightmare ducked providing a direct answer.
Or perhaps, Valrico’s answer to the Tower of Babel preferred to that old adage, often attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than speak out and remove all doubt.”
In any event, you could say, by her vow of silence Storm’s fellow senators received their answer loud and clear and - scary.
You know, we had those rascals for about four innings. I’m talking about us - The Media All Stars - and how we had that team from the Lighthouse for the Blind on the ropes in 20th annual Beepball Classic at the New York Yankees Community Field this afternoon.
I think they were a tad overconfident. Maybe it was winning the first 19 years in a row. Beepball is a variation of baseball - a pretty strange variation at that . The idea is to hit a beeping ball while you are blindfolded and then to try and find the beeping base before the outfield finds the beeping ball. There’s more but you get the picture.
I knew it was going to be a close game when their big hitter Lee Kimbrell slashed a hit up the middle That
s traditionally been the beginning of the end, but this time our own Alicia Roberts, WFLA’s morning traffic person deluxe, sacrificed her body, diving to the ground to scoop it up.
After New York Yankee’s Phil McNiff scored our first run, Tampa City Councilman Charlie Miranda whacked one down the first base line and for the first time in a dozen or so years we were leading.
I think we might have pushed our luck later on when our Pinetop Peterson set his mystical Mojo Hand, which comes in a giant jar, behind home plate.
The mojo worked against us and the Lighthouse team, led by Kimbrell, scored five runs, finally winning for the 20th consecutive time 7-3.
Hey it was a beautiful day, the hot dogs were great, the Coleman Middle School Orchstra was super and there is always next year.
It wasn’t exactly breaking news, but the source was a little surprising when Tampa City Councilman Charlie Miranda announced that the council is “dysfunctional.’’ For several reasons Charlie is my favorite councilman and one of them is his ability to cut to the chase. On Thusday they managed to drag out a discussion on limiiting their own campaign contributions for what seemed hours.
It finally got to that point where Charlie lost it and declared the whole crowd dysfunctional and announced he was goign to run for county commssion. Should all that happen and he gets a seat on the county board, you have to wonder how long it’s going to take for him to realize he has fallen into the Black Hole of dysfunction.
- Actually my personal concern is that Charlie and Councilwoman Mary Mulhern are in my starting lineup in tomorrow’s Beepball game against the Lighthouse for the Blind (10 a.m. at the New York Yankees Community Field right next to Legends Fieldy. The last thing I need is a dysfuntional infield as we try to snap or 19-year string of losses to the Lighthouse.
Not a very catchy headline is it? thought I might try some daily ramblings and see how it goes. They probably won’t be anything too heavy, just ramblings.
We watched the latest Presidential debate last night, this one from Philadelphia. I’ve been wondering when the candidates might get down to something substantial. It didn’t happen last night, although I can’t blame the two Democrats who were at the mercy of the ABC network’s moderators. They were more interested in the cult of personality that has become the trademark of our media and they worked it mercilessly.
- Today has been such a day of contrasts as the media focuses on that bizarre Texas cult and the coming of the Pope to the United States. It is on days like this we are reminded of our diverse and different we really are.
Come this January, upon assuming office the next president of the United States will have to confront (in no particular order):
1) The war in Iraq.
2) An economy in free fall.
3) Rising gas prices.
4) Terrorism.
5) Global warming.
6) A crumbling infrastructure.
7) Restoring American credibility around the world.
8) A disgraceful public education system.
9) Rebuilding a stressed military.
10) A variety of complex multinational trade issues.
And then on the second day in office, things will really get busy.
So on Wednesday evening what consumed nearly the first 50 minutes of the ABC News Democratic presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama?
Who said what when? Whose preacher is an moron? What did so and so mean when he or she blah-blahed this, or yada-yadaed that?
Nearly half of a two-hour debate was preoccupied with the dodging sniper gaffe, the crazy minister rants and serving on the board of some organization with an old, radical hippie.
It was embittering, is what it was.
At the same time, George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson, who proved to be about as effectively inquisitive as Barney Fife, treated the debate as if this was an election for Moose Lodge president.
Roughly 12 minutes was spent on Iraq, about 15 minutes on the economy. Another 12 minutes was dedicated to gun and gun control, about the same amount of time allotted to affirmative action.
Or put another way, this debate was more fixated on Obama’s comments on the non-issue of the bitterness or lack thereof of Pennsylvania voters than the candidate’s views on the matters of state, they as president would have to deal with after the swearing in.
There is a reason so many people distrust the news media.
Wednesday night, thanks to ABC’s treatment of a presidential debate as if it was the Q&A portion of the Miss American contest, the public has one more - legitimate - beef.
Just as it is probably true that no good deed goes unpunished, so too is it fair to say that on the campaign trail no attempt at candor goes undemagogued by one’s opponents.
In recent days, Democratic presidential candidate, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama has had his head handed to him for committing two of the most cardinal sins one can commit on the stump.
First he spoke, with unabashed premeditation, the truth. Next, he had the audacity of hope to treat voters as if they were mature and intelligent enough to understand what he was saying. Uh-oh.
And for that, he has been accused of “elitism” by both his Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton and presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain, both of whom have been part of the Washington “elite” for more than three decades. Go figure.
Even worse for Obama, he made his remarks in San Francisco, which the drive-by bloviators regard as more communistic than Ho Chi Minh City.
But what really was Obama’s so-called gaffe?
We hear politicians claim constantly about how they offer straight talk, an honest view, unabashed candor. And when they do, the pol gets slapped around like Curly Howard.
In speaking to a group of supporters at a fund-raiser, Obama observed he had sensed a growing feeling of anxiety among the electorate, noting: “And it’s not surprising then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
And they problem with the truth is ...?
This is probably why I would make for a lousy political consultant, because if I were advising Obama, my only advice would be that the senator didn’t go far enough.
Does anybody seriously doubt there isn’t a wave of anger, discontent and yes bitterness out there among the voting public?
We are bogged down in a debacle in Iraq, which was based on a tissue of lies and has cost more than 4,000 American lives, more than 30,000 casualties and has displaced almost five million Iraqis.
The war and occupation has been administered by a level of incompetence rivaling Laurel and Hardy trying to push a piano up a flight of stairs. More than $18 billion in taxpayer monies have been lost to corrupt Iraqis officials and indeed in some instances has been used to fund the insurgency.
Economists estimate the ultimate financial price for George Bush’s phony war in Iraq with cost three trillion dollars - and that money will be borrowed.
Bitter? You better believe it.
In 2002, oil cost around $25-a-barrel. It is now $110-a-barrel, helping to fuel a recession.
Americans are losing their jobs and their homes to foreclosure.
It costs more to fill your tank, buy a loaf of bread or send your kid to school.
Bitter? Duh!
It is also true that in difficult times, people in small towns and large cities tend to turn more inwardly to their faiths.
Church attendance spiked in the weeks and months after the terrorists attacks of Sept. 11.
And it also true that in times of economic uncertainly, when people worry about their jobs, their futures, those fears are often self-defensively directed toward all manner of groups or issues.
Flip around the radio dial at almost any given moment and the anti-immigrant blabbering is cacophonous. Barack Obama simply dared to call attention to it.
It is certainly probable Obama’s remarks may well damage his poll numbers and perhaps even widen the gap of his likely defeat in the upcoming Pennsylvania primary.
No doubt, for the Obama camp that will be a disappointing, but hardly a bitter moment.
For how can you be bitter when you’re right?
A very simple question.
When the first work place murders occur as a result of the passage of the Florida’s newly legislated “Take Your Guns To Work” law, who should the grieving surviving family members send the burial expenses? Gov. Charlie Crist, who is expected to sign this nonsense into law? The Florida Legislature, which now made it easier for nut jobs in the office to start killing people?
Or perhaps the National Rifle Association and its Steve and Eydie of the Lock & Load crowd, former Florida House member, mortician Dennis Baxley and lobbyist Marion Hammer, who argued people with concealed weapons permits could take their weapons to the workplace, thus trumping the private property rights of employers to set the ground-rules of what is acceptable conduct on company grounds.
If you needed any argument about the rank hypocritical stupidity of this law, consider that the new statute would exempt certain workplaces like nuclear power plants, hospitals, jails and schools to continue to ban employees from bringing their weapons to work.
Why is that?
If the notion that citizens should be free to take their little guns onto the grounds of their employer as some sort of perverse adherence to the Second Amendment, why then shouldn’t that same “right” also extend to schools, nuclear power plants, jails and hospitals?
Well there’s a very simple reason why.
Workplace violence is a serious, national problem. The exemptions underscore rather vividly that the authors of the “Sucking Up To The NRA” bill understood quite clearly that there are indeed crazy, twisted, unhinged people in the workplace, who if they had easy access to a weapon would become even scarier whack-jobs who talk to themselves in the next cubicle.
So if it’s worth protecting employees who work in schools, power plants, hospitals and jails, why are other workers suddenly so expendable simply to lather up a powerful special interest group?
Even more surreal. The new law could well be found unconstitutional, as it was in Oklahoma.
Or put another way, this damaged, ridiculous legislation might already be legally DOA.
Well, better dead in the courts before the body bags start to pile up.
So Farmer Buddy has been late or has not completely paid his property taxes for four years in a row. And this is the same Farmer Buddy who was looking for some exemptions on his property because he let someone else graze twelve cows there.
Farmer Buddy is hardly unique in Hillsborough County in being late or in working the rules to try to save a few bucks.
But Buddy Johnson is also the Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections. Maybe we shouldn’t try to hold elected officials to higher standards or even as models of anything because we are so frequently disappointed . Buddy has a right to work the system as much as anyone else.
At the same time this is the same guy repsonsible for huge amounts of your tax dollars and for operating an elections department that needs to not only be efficient but squeaky clean. Historically this office has failed at both and something like this doesn’t do much to raise anybody’s confidence level in what’s going on down there.
Did you catch the Olympic torch todayas it made its one and only appearance in the United States in San Francisco?
With protest crowds lining the streets of the city, the torch bearer made her way off the platofrm, into a warehouse, into a motorcade and was last seen leaving the country faster than last year’s Christmas toys.
Most telling was the Chinese news agency, which reported back home that everything went just swell over in America.
It is going to be an interesting summer as China attempts to let the world in without the politics and winds of free speech that come with it..
This was supposed to be an entry about Charlton Heston, the late actor who came to symbolize the very essence of the BIG, I tell ya, big epic movie.
Back in 1979, when I was the film critic for the Ministry of Truth, Heston, then 55, came to here to participate in a Canadian Club Pro-Celeb Tennis Classic event at the Bayfront Center. As a mega-star of his stature with “The Ten Commandments,” “Ben-Hur” and “Planet of the Apes” under his belt, the actor certainly didn’t have to make time for a scribbler of my humble journalistic bloodlines.
But he did and the result was a fairly wide-ranging interview in which Heston discussed his approach to roles, the art of move-making at the time and his own calculation of his worth to a fim, noting he never demanded the multimillion dollar salaries his peers insisted upon, preferring instead to take a percentage of the film’s gross.
“I think if the picture’s not a hit, then, I don’t deserve a million dollars,” Heston smiled. “Nobody is.”
Despite whether you agreed with Heston’s later image as an advocate for the NRA, the actor was classic, old-school Hollywood - courtly, gracious and unpretentious. Indeed, not long after my piece ran, Heston sent a handwritten letter, thanking me for MY time to talk to him. It was a very classy gesture.
In preparing to write this, I had to pull the actual newspaper clipping of the story from our archives.
Since about 1990, everything you have read in The Tampa Tribune has been electronically preserved. But prior to that year, the history of this newspaper has been kept in a series of massive vaults - on the original paper it was first printed upon.
As you might imagine, given Charlton Heston’s career, his clip file was thick with entries, including one yellowed story from 1953.
But it was first clip that fell out of Heston’s file, which brought back a flood of memories.
It was dated, Dec. 19, 1978, a wire story written by Jane Gregory for the Chicago Sun-Times Wire Service about Charlton Heston and a book he had authored, “The Actor’s Life.”
By-lines are fairly innocuous things in this business. Most people pay very little attention to them, unless, of course, what they just read had royally peeved them off and they want to know who to blame.
I had probably even read Jane Gregory’s piece on Heston at the time and forgotten about it. Many years later though, as fate would it, I would work with Jane Gregory, work with her up until the day she died in the newsroom.
Jane was one of those people you run across in this racket from time to time, a true jack of all trades. She had covered breaking news and crime, entertainment and fashion, a little bit of everything.
But she was hardly the stereotypical hard-boiled Chicago reporter. This was a gracious, elegant, soft-spoken woman of great wit and literacy.
In 1984, I joined the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times and a year later became the paper’s television critic, where I had to pleasure to get know Jane back in the features department.
In the late 1980s the do-gooders at the Sun-Times successfully lobbied to have smokers like Jane and me banished from the newsroom and exiled to a small, windowless room complete with some ashtrays and a couple of computers.
The decor was lousy. The camaraderie was golden.
One afternoon, the smokers were taking out their invective on Henry Kisor, the book editor and truly lovely man, who in the opinion of the smoking room had writtten a somewhat too chummy, too flattering profile of Scott Turow.
As the barbs about Henry’s piece flowed back and forth, Jane gently acknowledged that she too, had found the piece boring and feigned falling asleep with her head in her hands.
Several minutes passed as everyone continued to gab about Henry’s story when someone noticed Jane was still pretending to be asleep.
Jane, though, was dead. Dead without a sound. Dead without calling the slightest attention to herself. Dead, as only Jane could be dead - understated literally to the very end.
Several hours later, after the body had been removed. One reporter ventured into the smoking area and after proceeding to sit down for a cigarette, realized about half-way into settling into chair, this had been where Jane was sitting when her heart simply - stopped. The reporter quickly straightened and found somewhere else to perch.
Jane died doing what she loved doing most, working in this often silly, insane, threatened business of newspapers.
No one was ever quite sure what caused Jane’s eerie demise, but after a while, we all agreed to blame her death on Henry Kisor.
Death by boredom. Jane would have liked the simplicity of that. But we never told Henry.
Now some members of the Tampa Art Museum’s board want to put up a rooftop terrace on the new art museum about to be constructed downtown on the river. The pitch is that it would act as a fund raiser for the museum, hosting weddings, bar mitzvahs and the like, providing an open air facility overlooking the minarets across the Hillsborough River. It sounds romantic, moonlight over Monet and all that ,but the more cynical out there might see it as just a venue for the artsy fartsy set that most of us would never see.
I say build it but, except for a designated number of occasions, open it up, put in a few potted palms and call it a public park.
These days Wright Gres is a tugboat captain living on a bluff over the Altamaha River in southeastern Georgia. But he is a Tampa native, who grew up sailing and working on anything that floated around Tampa Bay.
Now Gres has written a novel, “Macedonian Passage: Dangerous Cargo.’’ It’s a good read and for a first novel a very good read. He’s back in town and will be at the Inkwood Bookstore in Hyde Park Thursday at 7 p.m. He’s a likable guy tells some great stories.
The bad news is that legislators are still meandering around Tallahassee. The good news is about the most important on their agenda these days seems to be the state song. After spending a few months holding an online contest to come up with a new song to replace “Old Folks At Home,’’ they have finally concluded that the winner sounds more like background music at a Disney attraction and are trying to salvage the current one.
Their solution is to keep the original with revised lyrics that replace the original words done in mock slave dialect. That’s OK by me except that some legislators apparently want to write their own, brand new lyrics. You have to figure if a legislative committee gets hold of that, they will spend the next six months trying to come with a verse that rhymes with “Seating the Florida delegation.’’
John McCain turning to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for advice on education is a bit like hiring the Donner Party to cater the inaugural ball.
But there was the presumptive Republican presidential nominee the other day extolling the Bush Junta years as some sort of golden age of education
“He’s very well-respected on many issues, but education is probably one where he has a national reputation,” McCain said, which makes you wonder if he was immediately led away with a shawl draped around his shoulders for a nice nap and some warm milk.
A “national reputation”?!?!?! Oh really? Good grief, Bush may well have a “national reputation,” but it is much more likely for turning Florida schools into the Jack Kevorkian of the Three Rs.
Over the course of eight long, insufferable years in Tallahassee where he spent his days posing for holy pictures, Jeb Bush managed to leave office with Florida public schools ranked behind Chernobyl, the Planet Zircon 9 and the Paleolithic Period.
And John McCain treasures Jeb Bush’s counsel on education? That’s like looking to Uday and Qusay for guidance on how to pick up women.
During the Bush regime, the Florida Supreme Court ruled the governor’s ham-handed private school voucher plan unconstitutional.
At the end of his term, high school graduation rates ranked anywhere from 48th to 50th in the nation.
And while Jeb Bush, turned into the Paula Dean of cooked books, claiming 75 percent of the state’s classrooms were A and B schools, his own brother’s U.S. Department of Education noted some 72 percent of Florida schools failed to meet federal standards.
During his governorship, Jeb Bush turned the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test into a weapon against teachers and students.
And now John McCain portrays Jeb Bush as some sort of perverse champion of education?
Oh dear. Isn’t that like turning to the Grim Reaper for advice on stand-up comedy?
As great moments in press flackery goes, this was a classic case of a profile in porridge.
It is the sad fate of the political press apparatchik to occasionally attempt to transform the complete hooey of the boss and try to turn their mealy-mouthed blubbering into something sounding even semi-bold, partly visionary, almost coherent.
Here, in its entirety is the press release sent out earlier today by the Florida Democratic Party under the guise of “News From The Florida Democratic Party.” You might want to get a strong cup of coffee.
“Joint Statement from Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Karen L. Thurman and Florida’s Democratic Congressional Delegation on Seating Florida’s Delegates.”
And that was just the headline. Here’s what followed.
“WASHINGTON, D.C. - After a joint meeting today among Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Karen L. Thurman and Florida’s Democratic Congressional Delegation, the participants issued this joint statement:
“We are all committed to doing everything we can to ensure that a Florida delegation is seated in Denver. We all agree that whatever the solution, it must have the support of both campaigns.
“While there may be differences of opinion in how we get there, we are all committed to ensuring that Florida’s delegation is seated in Denver. We’re committed to working with both campaigns to reach a solution as soon as realistically possible.
“We are laying the groundwork to ensure we win in Florida in November and spent time here today talking about how to do just that. We will continue to work towards a solution to ensure delegates are seated and logistics in place for a Florida delegation in Denver.”
Let’s see here. Thurman, Dean, along with the Florida congressional caucus, which includes U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, along with House members, Allen Boyd, Corrine Brown, Kathy Castor, Alcee Hastings, Ron Klein, Tim Mahoney, Kendrick Meek, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Robert Wexler ALL met to resolve the primary election debacle and this four paragraph pile of public relations claptrap was the best these towering political minds could come up with?!?!?
As well the press release announcing the Democrats had nothng to say was co-issued by three (count ‘em, three) party press minions, Stacie Paxton and Mark Bubriski and Alejandro Miyar. This wasn’t like drafting the Magna Carta. This was a yada-yda-yada-blah-blah-blah press release supposedly reflecting the combined views of 12 Democrats and the best they could come up with was: “we’re committed.”
Now there’s a “Ask not what your country can do for you,” moment.
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