Showing posts with label Mike Allen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mike Allen. Show all posts

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Give the devil her due: nobody in Florida demagogues & obfuscates like the dreaded DWS; Politico: "Wasserman Schultz says GOP seeks ‘dictatorship..."

Give the devil her due, nobody in Florida demagogues & obfuscates like the dreaded Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL-20) -Politico: "Wasserman Schultz says GOP seeks ‘dictatorship..."


POLITICO
Debbie Wasserman Schultz says GOP seeks ‘dictatorship … spark panic'
By Mike Allen
July 27, 2011 5:52 PM EDT
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), chair of the Democratic National Committee, said Wednesday that House Republicans are trying to impose “dictatorship” through their tactics in the debt-ceiling negotiations. She said the GOP rhetoric could “spark panic and chaos,” which she called “potentially devastating” to the economy.
Read the rest of the post at:

Meanwhile, north of here in the Panhandle part of Florida I've never ventured into, Tallahassee Democrat Senior Political Writer Bill Cotterell weighs in on the recent contretemps between DWS and Allen West that I wisely avoided writing about since it was everywhere you looked, and you could only NOT know about it if you lived in... well, no, you'd know about it there, too.


Tallahassee Democrat
The art of the political insult
Today's lack elegance, but they get the job done
By Bill Cotterell
6:33 PM, Jul. 27, 2011

The above piece by the very insightful Bill Cotterell, is an exception to what I've often written here of the hagiography that goes on in the Florida press corps with regard to DWS, esp. at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and local Miami TV stations.

The female reporters in South Florida are especially reluctant to ask DWS questions that are either hard or original, just the same softballs, year-after-year.
It's monotonous with a capital "M."

But then that's why so many female reporters here are simply not taken seriously by well-informed people regardless of gender.
Simply put, too many of the reporters are personally shallow AND happily uninformed and really ought to be in much smaller media markets.

But like DWS -and most of the female sideline reporters at ESPN- they are gerrymandered into their current positions.

In some cases by virtue of this area's low-pay and need to have a certain demographic group represented on TV, regardless of how unappealing they are -dopey women who really do think stories on plastic surgery ARE imp0rtant, and ought to be on within the first ten minutes of a newscast- but nothing short of video of them shooting someone will get them off the air or off the newspaper beat.
The joke is on us, the readers and viewers who have to tolerate the towering mediocrity.

Here's a recent example of the sort of hagiography I meant, which actually compelled me to write in and comment because it sounded so much like a puff piece from her own paid govt. flack.


St. Petersburg Times
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz uses her resolve to fight cancer, lead DNC.
By Alex Leary, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Sunday, July 17, 2011

Back on the 16th I wrote:


Is there no end in sight to the number of articles that can be written about this woman and cancer? Are there so few compelling political or government stories in the fourth-largest state in the country that this sort of filler must continue to be churned out, over-and-over? Simply put, there is nothing here that hasn't been written a dozen times before -and better.
And I surmise THAT is something that both liberals and conservatives can agree on.
For instance, how about writing about the number of State House and Senate members that DON'T live at the addresses they claim they do, both before and after the election, and how the legislature just looks the other way, despite the fact that it's illegal?
There are three of them in just South Florida alone!
Just saying...
Alex, what happened to you? You used to show such promise.
Is this how it ends, with a banal whimper?