Showing posts with label New York Times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York Times. Show all posts

Saturday, June 18, 2016

My Muhammad Ali update, with great insight into him from two longtime favorites of mine, Roy Firestone and Maureen Dowd; @RoyFirestone @NYTimesDowd



#MuhammadAli thru prism of an avid, teenage sports fan in 1970's #Miami. #transcendent #SoFL
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2016/06/remembering-muhammad-ali-thru-prism-of.html

I have seen and read so many great and inspiring things about Muhammad Ali since my initial blog post of June 3rd about him and my memories of him from the 1970's while I was growing-up in Miami and South Florida, where he spent so much time -inc. the time I actually received an award from him- that I initially thought I'd have a lot of trouble deciding what to be sure to include in any update I ever did.

In the end, though, I decided to keep it simple, something that I don't always do here on the blog.

I decided to include the contributions from two hyper-observant people that I've both long admired and have come to know to a small extent over the intervening years since first leaving South Florida for college in Bloomington and my life thereafter.
Each person, uniquely, with their own personality clearly shining through, shares some insight and reflections about Ali and what to me made Ali such a unique character in American and world history: Maureen Dowd and Roy Firestone.

I really encourage anyone who has NOT read my earlier post to do so first, since they'll gain some very useful context on me and my observations about Ali that I think will well serve you to better appreciate the three of them. Trust me, you'll be glad you did!

That June 3rd post of mine also includes a great video of Roy talking about Ali that as I have said and written elsewhere, has the great advantage of not only being funny and sweet, but 100% true.
#perceptive doesn't even begin to describe it.
I've posted it below, too.

Ironically, as it happens, I also once shared an early film review of Will Smith as Ali with Maureen Dowd in the lobby of the NY Times Washington bureau, where she works as a columnist.
That's the same lobby where for SO many years during the 15 years I lived and worked in the D.C. area, until 2003, that I used to spend a LOT of time after work with friends who not only worked upstairs at the Times, but also well-informed media-centric friends who worked nearby in downtown D.C., right around the corner of the Baltimore Orioles team store, another longtime haunt of mine.

(For those of you who are new to the blog, the Orioles store is where, on 9/11, hours after it happened, I first saw video of the Twin Towers coming down, after my colleagues and I were ordered to evacuate earlier that morning from our office, then located across the street from the FBI and Dept. of Justice on Pennsylvania Avenue, due to growing concern about the exact location of a "missing" airplane. The airplane which we subsequently came to know and grieve for which carried the very brave passengers and crew of United #93. 
Knowing that one of the planes that hit the Twin Towers that morning had originated out of Boston had filled me with dread all day because... on 9/11, one of my former Arlington housemates was a flight attendant who worked out of Logan Airport, so...) 

There in the lobby of the Army-Navy Building on Eye Street is also where, as I have blogged about previously, Maureen Dowd and I picked up our respective copies of Variety's Daily Gotham edition, Monday thru Friday. That edition is the one seldom seen in 99% of the country, and has the green masthead on the top to differentiate it from its much-larger weekly edition with the red masthead.

Even in a large and important city like D.C., there was a very tiny delivery window for the handful of people who subscribed to Daily Variety and could get it hand-delivered on a same day basis, at no extra cost, and luckily for me, 1627 Eye Street was one of them.
It helped enormously that the Motion Picture Association of America, MPAA, the U.S. film industry's trade association has its lobbying HQ in D.C. just down the block on Eye Street, which is how it came to be so many times over my 15 years there that I saw and even had a chance to talk sometimes to its iconic leader Jack Valenti, often while he was making his way down to the nearby CVS.

Sometimes, in her haste to get upstairs, depending upon who swung by the concierge's desk in the lobby first that particular morning, Maureen would grab my copy by mistake, so I'd have to take the copy with her name on the mailing label.
Which, as I've remarked here previously, occasionally, got me some pretty quizzical looks on my Metro ride home later to Arlington. :-)













Roy Firestone remembers Muhammad Ali on Good Day LA. with hosts Steve Edwards and Maria Sansone. He talked about his first interview ever, and it was interviewing Muhammad. He was only 21 years old.
FOX 11 Los Angeles YouTube Channel video, Uploaded on June 10, 2016
https://youtu.be/NKguJRUCIx0


Muhammad Ali's Procession
The New York Times YouTube Channel, Uploaded on June 10, 2016
https://youtu.be/G5ZDZMLfgqY


Muhammad Ali's Funeral
The New York Times YouTube Channel, Uploaded on June 10, 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bYFb97j7Ro




Monday, April 18, 2016

South Florida Journalism in 2016: The ever-expanding gulf between what the South Florida press corps offers up and the quality, local-centric news coverage the South Florida public craves, has never been as large as now; Margaret Sullivan gives as good as she gets in her final NY Times Public Editor column that hits out against elite/institutional bias

South Florida Journalism in 2016: The ever-expanding gulf between what the South Florida press corps offers up and the quality, local-centric news coverage the South Florida public craves, has never been as large as now; Margaret Sullivan gives as good as she gets in her final NY Times Public Editor column that hits out against elite/institutional bias
Revised April 21, 2016 at 3:15 p.m.

As most of you longtime readers of Hallandale Beach Blog know well by now -but which you newer readers don't, especially those of you who have only discovered me the past two years via my tweets @hbbtruth- I started this blog in 2007, largely out of a fit of frustration and anger at the self-evident failure and lack of individual/collective effort I saw on a daily basis by the South Florida news media. Specifically, its collective failure to evolve from what it once was -home to nationally-respected who were in some cases some of the best and most-dogged investigative news sleuths in the country.
It's why so many of them eventually wound up at the then-three national U.S. TV networks and the fledgling CNN when that cablenet debuted.

My complaint, summed-up, was that the South Florida's press corps' failed to build upon this track record, and failed to expand its level of news coverage of public policy and local government in ways that readers/viewers clearly wanted to see and rather expected.

Though I was born in San Antonio, Texas a few years before, my family arrived in Miami from Memphis when I was seven years old in the Summer of 1968, the day after Miami Dolphins #1 Draft pick Larry Csonka of Syracuse signed with the Dolphins.
As everyone who knows me then or now can tell you, I have been a devout news, sports and public affairs junkie ever since then.
But the difference between then and now is that when I was growing-up in South Florida in the '70's, there was an All-News AM radio station, WINZ AM 940 that was a CBS News affiliate and provided lots of news reportes to new York, especially those covering weather, immigration and the Sapce Shuttle.

That has NOT been the case in several decades, nor has there been even one attempt by anyone to lay the groundwork for a Local News Cable channel of the sort that has existed in many media markets throughout thsi country, including some smaller than South Florida's.

Why has COMCAST, long the dominant cable provider in South Florida, utterly failed to deliver on that potential? Well, you know who never asks?
The South Florida news media themselves, including the Miami Herald and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
If you want to waste an hour, try going thru their newspaper archives and try to find a single story about the subject in the past 20 years.
That's the sort of media area South Florida is.

That's made worse because with my crazy accurate memory, I've been able to recall  at the drop of a hat the names of individual reporters and anchors at local TV/radio stations and reporters and editors at the Miami Herald and the late Miami News -that I spent so much time at as a High School student- and the individual beats their reporters covered and owned .
And the important news stories they broke or gave much-needed historical context to when it really mattered to residents of South Florida, NOT after-the-fact months later in some investigative piece clearly designed to win journalism awards, NOT keep South Florida properly informed.

I still have an institutional memory of what those people were able to do with much less in the way of resources and technology than the current crew of South Florida journalists have and take for granted, for whatever reasons.
That doesn't just rankle, it makes me cringe, because so much of what I regularly consume from local South Florida media isn't just parochial but even shallower than the above ground swimming pools that once seemed to dominate South Florida and North Miami Beach in the 1970's.

And that means that getting to the heart of some of the endemic and unique problems of South Florida, much less their possible solutions, are one day farther away than they need to be for our community's long-term sake.

Over the past nine years that I have been writing this blog, a recurring theme here has been the cleavage between what the South Florida news media believes is perfectly acceptable in terms of effort and end product for news consumers, and what the public wants and expects from them. 

A graph where X never meets Y.

Over the years, the insufficient level of individual and collective effort expended by the South Florida press corps and the dominant English-language news outlets has only gnawed away at me and other well-informed observers I know and trust, as we are continually see both individual reporter bias, institutional lack of historical knowledge and lack of torpedo every well-intentioned effort to make local South Florida residents better informed about their community and the state that is now the third-largest in the country.

We see the growing gap between what the public expects from print/TV reporters and columnists and TV Assignment Editors and News Directors, in the form of interesting and compelling ways to cover local news, and what is actually presented to us as readers and viewers, as the very seeds for our area's growing technology and information gap.
A growing class and income chasm that won't be made smaller by simply pretending that it doesn't exist.

These same national trends are regularly and correctly decried in Washington as harmful to the nation's future and economic vitality when presented calmly as facts by politicians of varying political persuasions and august public interest groups with demonstrated track records for being non-partisan, but somehow, closer to home, these same problems are largely ignored when they are pointed out by people like myself and other public observers in South Florida who want this community to be MUCH BETTER than it is,.
Even when we use self-evident facts and the news media's own track record as our opening and closing arguments.

It's not exactly a secret that compared to the rest of the country, South Florida's relative youth historically -the City of Miami not being founded until 1897- and large and ever-growing population of Northeastern and Midwestern transplants whose history and allegiances remain elsewhere years after they've moved here, has always worked against the long-term interests of South Florida institutions, civic groups and foundations, even ones who profess laudable societal goals and do try to show some spirit and verve.

But this also means these groups are NOT front-of-mind and front-and-center when it comes to focusing the community's attention on problems the way similar groups are elsewhere in the country.
It's not an excuse, merely a reflection of history and common knowledge, borne of experience living in and growing-up in South Florida.
But at some point, these same groups current unwillingness to point out the problems at hand and suggesting tangible solutions, has to be called out, and I will be doing just that in a future post with some energy and enthusiasm that I know will surprise and anger many with its ferocity and focus.

So be it!

My blog has never been interested in carrying the water for South Florida's elites or well-off.
#disrupt

But as it concerns today's theme of journalistic lack of effort in South Florida, it's hard to shake the notion that many of these civic groups ansd foundations, so dependent upon the South Florida news media for positive attention and charity dollars when they can get it, seem to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy denying self-evident problem in large part  because of whose oxen may well need to be gored. (Or is it a case of being afraid to bite the hand that feeds them?) 
The South Florida news media's.

To me and many of the people I regularly speak with and confide in here in South Florida and throughout the Sunshine State -even many reporters, editors, columnists and TV anchors whose names are known instantly to many of you- the gulf in South Florida between what is possible in local journalism because of advances in technology that make it easier than ever to report accurately and in real-time, has, unfortunately, never seemed so large as at it does at present.

This is made all the worse by what takes place everyday with the two largest South Florida-based daily newspapers, McClatchy's Miami Herald and the Tribune Company's South Florida Sun-Sentinel, both of whom are and have been going in the wrong direction from readers desires for far too many years.


Since the majority of my focus on this blog, despite my 1,001 other interests and passions, has always been what is happening in South Florida -for good or for bad and why- I write to day to share some much-needed wisdom from a trusted source I have long depended upon, even while never mentioning her previously: Margaret Sullivan, the departing New York Times Public Editor.
At the end of her term as the the Reader's Ombudsman, just as was true throughout when she never hesitated to challenge long-established Times icons and the Times' often counter-intuitive ways of thinking about the larger public interest, Margaret Sullivan gives as good as she gets.

As I have remarked here many times in the past with fact-filled blog post and copies of letters to the Miami Herald's management, the Herald never replaced their Ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, after he left for NPR. And they consciously ignored many of the common sense suggestions he made about journalists.

That includes his April 25, 2010 column, Reporter-columnists tread fine line with readers' trust about the need for journalists to publicly come out to readers as one one thing or the other, i.e. not being both reporter AND columnist, because of the damage that such dual roles can cause to perceived bias and credibility with readers.

The Herald ignored that advice when it came to dealing with both Beth Reinhard and later, Marc CaputoIf you want a copy of that column, just write me and ask for a copy.
It's not been available at the Herald's website for many years.

To see how indifferent the Herald's management was to reader perceptions of bias or unfairness, take a poke at my blog post from May 21 of 2012 titled, 
"What's going on at the Miami Herald? More than a year after the last one fled, the Herald still lacks an Ombudsman -and shows no sign of getting one- to represent readers deep concerns about bias, misrepresentation and flackery on behalf of South Florida's powerful & privileged at the Herald. And that's just one of many unresolved problems there..." 

See also, among many others to choose from:

11/12/10 - A day in the life of McClatchy's Miami Herald, as viewed by a reader who's largely given up on them fixing their problems, or surviving long-term
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/day-in-life-of-mcclatchys-miami-herald.html

12/21/11- 
For another consistently lousy year of journalism at the Miami Herald, esp. covering Broward County, more lumps of coal in the Christmas stocking of One Herald Plaza -Part 1

8/13/13 - Former Miami Herald Ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos -whose position at the Herald remains unfilled 27 months later by McClatchy execs- as NPR's Ombudsman, lays the wood into NPR's Laura Sullivan & Amy Walters for a 2011 investigation re foster care in South Dakota, which officials there took umbrage with, and for good reason it seems. “My finding is that the series was deeply flawed and should not have been aired as it was”

I hasten to add that this was also during the McClatchy era when the Herald ran a multi-weeks old story about Donald Trump in the "Breaking News" section of the Herald's Broward homepage on Monday December 19th, 2011 at 11:21 p.m.
And there it stayed for days...
Really. :-(

Margaret Sullivan's final column from last Friday is a column of pure gold, for it has much that the South Florida press corps could and SHOULD learn from in the way of perceived reporter/editorial/institutional bias, attention to accuracy and willingness to publicly admit mistakes.

I highly commend it to you and ask you to consider sharing it with others you know in South Florida and throughout the Sunshine State who think as I (we) do -that South Florida and the rest of the state would be much better off with a fully-engaged and curious press corps year-round, not the one we have had for years that habitually takes a Summer slumber or vacation come mid-June, never to be seen again until after Labor Day, no matter how important the story.

New study by "the American Press Institute - almost no one trusts the media. The report found that just six percent of Americans have a great amount of confidence in the press.  To put that into perspective, the API ‘s study showed that Americans trust only Congress less than the media. Other organizations that the public has more confidence in than journalists: banks, organized religion, the Supreme Court, and the military.  The number one reason people mistrust the media is that they found reports one-sided or biased. Following closely behind was that readers found something factually inaccurate. Interestingly, respondents to the API report said that how a media outlet responds to inaccurate reports is extremely important.  “Several focus group participants said they do not expect news sources to be perfect and how a source reacts to errors can actually build trust,” stated the report. “Several people said that owning up to mistakes and drawing attention to errors or mistakes can show consumers that a source is accountable and dedicated to getting it right in the long term.” 
On the heels of this not-at-all surprising survey comes this great rear-view column from Sullivan, soon-to-be the Washington Post's new media columnist.




New York Times
The Public Editor's Journal - Margaret Sullivan  
Five Things I Won’t Miss at The Times — and Seven I Will  By Margaret Sullivan 
April 15, 2016 10:00 am 
April 15, 2016 10:00 am
While preparing to leave the public editor’s office and move to Washington, I’ve been getting together in recent weeks with some people I’ve met while living in New York. One was Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed, who asked me over lunch what columns I planned to do before I left. I tossed it back to him, asking what he would like to read, and he suggested I take up “what I love and what I hate about The New York Times.”
This guy’s definitely got a future as an editor! I decided to tweak his idea, with a nod to Nora Ephron’s list from her book, “I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections.” (Of all the people I wish I had been able to meet in New York, she tops the list.)
Read the rest of her great post at:
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/15/five-things-i-wont-miss-at-the-times-and-seven-i-will/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Opinion&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body&_r=1

Friday, May 29, 2015

Personal thoughts on the proposed idea of a gondola going across the Potomac River, next to Key Bridge, from Washington DC's Georgetown area to Arlington County's Rosslyn Metro station. Naturally, it causes me to recall crossing it on 9/11. Don't ruin the views of that iconic bridge -and the iconic views FROM it. NO to the #gondola









GreaterGreaterWashington blog
Yes, it's worth looking into a gondola in DC 
by Topher Mathews 
May 29, 2015


Having lived in Arlington County for about 15 years from 1988-2003, a mile north of Ballston Metro, conservatively, I've walked across Key Bridge about a thousand-plus times to get to and from Georgetown and Downtown DC from Arlington. 
It actually could be even more times, since I also worked part-time for a few years at stores in Georgetown, both at the Abercrobie & Fitch in the Georgetown Mall in the early '90's, and years later at the Barnes & Noble Superstore .and often walked home at night after closing.

USA Today's Susan Page was a very frequent visitor at Barnes & Noble, especially baseball-related books, and A&F was where I'd first told then-U.S. Rep. Bill Richardson -whom I was a big admirer of- just what I'd heard and read about the newly-elected to the House Bernie Sanders of Vermont, after he admitted that he'd never heard of him before.

Many if not most walks across the bridge came on weekends when the Metro runs less frequently and I could walk to Georgetown and its great Washington Harbour area, one that I so often used as a second home for writing purposes, in about 75 minutes.
Roughly the same amount of time as walking to Ballston Metro and waiting and waiting and waiting... and then walking to Georgetown from the Foggy Bottom metro next to GWU, George Washington University.
If the weather was even halfway nice I'd usually walk, especially on sunny Sundays when I could listen to sports radio on my walk into Georgetown and not really think so much about the distance.
If you hadn't already caught on from previous posts over the past eight years, I'm a longtime walker from way back...

As I've written about previously here on the blog, including back on September 11th, 2011, 

9/11 -George F. Will on the American landscape ten years after 9/11: Commemoration can’t heal what is self-inflicted

http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/911-george-f-will-on-american-landscape.html


that includes my experiences on 9/11, walking from my office on Pennsylvania Avenue opposite the DOJ and the FBI, and walking' the seven-plus miles or so home because, 

a.) the Metro was packed like sardines times ten, and, frankly,
b.) I didn't want to be underground for so long and not know what was going on.

Everyone in my office had been kept informed via my awesome portable Sony radio the size of a sub sandwich, which had TV station audio reception back then, before FCC's Digital TV changes changed that.
We all listened to the audio of NBC's Today Show, but I didn't personally see footage of collapsing WTC Towers until hours later, at the Baltimore Orioles team store in downtown DC around the corner from NY Times Washington bureau, where I headed after my building was ordered to evacuate because of the fears that a plane -what we later came to all know was United #93- would be used to attack the Capitol Building or the White House.

Bud Verge was a friend I'd met and the very savvy and friendly manger of the O's Team store then, and it was there while he waited for his wife to come pick him that watching a TV that usually was running Orioles team highlights, that I first saw the two Towers fall.
Then I walked over to the NY Times Washington bureau to hear what some of  my friends and their colleagues had heard or was being reported, before I decided to finsih my walk home, a little bit better infromed than I had been when the fighter jets were flying directly overhead.

Lots of other north Arlington residents I know walked home by choice across Key Bridge from downtown DC or even Capitol Hill because they shared the same concerns I had, that given everything that had already happened that morning, to say nothing of all the rumors we heard reported at the time, like the State Dept. being partially-bombed, something would or could happen on the Metro -or to it.

With my work clothes in my gym bag over my shoulder and that radio under my left arm like a football, every few minutes I'd stop and let a group of passersby catch their breath, too. and together, we'd get caught up on what we "knew" at the time via uncertain voices reporting "facts" from DC or NYC.
And all you could do was shake your head at what you were hearing.

That was never more the case then when standing halfway across Key Bridge over the Potomac looking at the nearby Washington Monument, looming larger than ever.
I still remember exactly how that felt.

So yeah, while I understand the arguments for studying the gondola idea cited by GreaterGreaterWashington, I'm firmly against a gondola that would ruin the view of that iconic bridge and the views that you can see FROM it.
Let 'em walk across the bridge.
Or call Uber or lyft.

Monday, June 23, 2014

#tonedeaf -Once again, Hallandale Beach's thin-skinned, attention-hog of a mayor, Joy Cooper, is saying exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time to frustrated Hallandale Beach residents, taxpayers & small business owners. This time, about increasing the minimum wage, despite the fact that as residents know only too well, far too many of the city's employees and contractors consistently under-perform and yet have no fear of repercussions they'd face anywhere else

Well, so much for starting the new week off in a good mood.
Today's New York Times should serve as a real wake-up call to those in the Hallandale Beach community who, counter-intuitively given the mountain of evidence to the contrary, have been content for years to simply look the other way regarding the lingering questions about Mayor Joy Cooper whenever any discussion occurred amongst straight-talking family members or out-of-town friends about how a city like Hallandale Beach, located in a great geographic location between Miami and Fort Lauderdale and next to the beach, has continued to be such a self-evident mess under her the past dozen years.

That a mean-spirited woman like Joy Cooper with such a demonstrated history of being completely oblivious to the reality of how poorly Hallandale Beach has been run for years under her ruinous anti-democratic reign, and how manifestly under-performing and insolent such a high percentage of the the city's employees have been and continue to be -including Dept. heads and key Administrators- is, admittedly, NOT news.

So that said, why should any of us who DO pay attention to matters hereabouts be the least bit surprised that Cooper is now publicly trying to draw attention to HERSELF by calling for a pay increase for those same employees, as well as the city's army of not-so-competent contractors -i.e Lanzo on NE 14th Avenue in the never-ending pipe/road project from hell; or the firm responsible for the city's third-rate website or the one responsible for the poorly-performing streaming of City meetings, often with no audio or picture for 30 minutes or more...?

More $$$ that Joy Cooper wants to dole out that comes from us -with her taking the bows and thanks- when what we should really be getting from HB City Hall is a long overdue refund and an apology. In fact, multiple apologies!

How truly out-of-touch with HB residents and small business owners is Mayor Cooper?
As if any of us needed more evidence to add to the mountain that's staring us in the face, the article below from today's New York Times shows us.
She wants taxpayers to be be paying more in salary to employees and contractors, Exhibits A and B in what is at the heart of this city's problems: incompetency and bad performance.

To give you a better sense of how true that is, I'll soon be sharing here -complete with fact-filled photos that leave no question about what the reality of the situation is- one self-evident example after another showing how months after I publicly chastised City Manager Renee Miller for about five minutes straight at the combined NE/SE/Beach Quadrant meeting at the The Hemispheres condominium meeting room over on the beach.
Very specific examples of how it's not just Hallandale Beach residents that have realized how phony Miller's high-minded rhetoric and claims to be a reformer were in 2012, but others in Broward County as well.

The short version is that I told Miller that her claims to actually welcome public/neighborhood input and ideas, were, based on the past two years of history, an exaggerated and self-serving lie, and one that her own staff now realized, too. 
Then told her that the proof that her own staff and Dept. heads were tuning her and her high-minded rhetoric from 2012, and having no problem at all in being publicly insolent to the community, with absolutely no fear of repercussions from HER, were precisely what happened to me and has happened to so many of you, belied by Miller's own unsatisfactory behavior/performance/attitude.

I publicly identified three people -including two Dept, heads: Schanz at Parks & Rec and Parkinson at DPW- whom I had contacted via email, both in September and in the weeks prior to the Quadrant meeting, re specific questions involving the HB Parks bond issue and some longstanding problems with the city's Mini Bus transportation system that directly and adversely affects riders.
Problems that the people in charge showed absolutely no desire to accept responsibility for or attempt to satisfactorily resolve.
It will come as no surprise to you that none of the three city employees responded as we'd have a right to expect, despite sending reminders to them that they had failed to respond.
(And that none of the self-evident problems was resolved either.)

And, of course, they've never responded to me in the weeks and months SINCE the Quadrant meeting, despite the fact that they were in the room when CM Miller specifically said that she expected better of her staff. And that, in the end, the person responsible was her.
Well, in most parts of the country, I'd have heard from one of the three in the days afterwards, but here, nothing from the three of them and Miller.
So, yes, it'll be another example of me having to pull off another embarrassing band-aid re HB City Hall's longstanding incompetency and bungling that the local press continues to ignore and that the public has had ENOUGH of to last them a lifetime.

In case you hadn't realized it, a dubious anniversary draws near.
The next few days mark exactly two years since a serious mistake in judgement was made and Rene Miller was hired as Hallandale Beach City Manager.
Despite plenty of people in town giving her the benefit of the doubt long after she proved how unsatisfactory she was to the task, including some of you, Miller has not only proven a compete fraud as to being a reformer and being willing to try new innovative ideas the public supports, she has in fact tried to consolidate her power at HB City Hall by hiring LOTS of cronies of hers from the City of Miami Gardens, her former employer, including the recently-hired new head of Personnel in HB.

Simply put, after two years of her NOT coming anywhere close to effectuating any of the much-needed positive attitude and performance changes among the city's army of employees, City Manager Renee Miller clearly can't be trusted any longer with OUR city's future.
Miller needs to be replaced as City Manager AFTER November's elections, where new faces on the dais will not repeat past mistakes and ignore the reality of perpetual dysfunction that HB residents, taxpayers and small business owners experience everyday.
A long overdue reality check needs to be firmly delivered at HB City Hall this November.
  
--------------
New York Times
Mayors Put Focus on How to Raise Wages for Lowest-Paid Workers in Cities
By SHAILA DEWAN
June 22, 2014

DALLAS — About one in five people in Hallandale Beach, Fla., live below the poverty line. Though it is a small city — 37,000 people, a horse track and a greyhound track — its mayor, Joy Cooper, bellied up to the table during a jobs committee discussion on Saturday among the nation’s mayors and fired off a few questions about raising the minimum wage, if not for the whole city, at least for businesses with city contracts.

“I want to make sure my employees are cared for properly,” Ms. Cooper said later. “I want to have a high-quality work force.”

Read the rest of the article at: 

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Delicious! ICYMI in October, Ralph Benko reviews Niall Ferguson's factual assault on Paul Krugman and considers it a huge public service, ending it with, "Play taps for Private Krugman." I agree! As for the terministic screens...



Been meaning to post this wonderful post full of ideas for weeks...
Delicious! ICYMI in October, Ralph Benko reviews Niall Ferguson's factual assault on Paul Krugman and considers it a huge public service, ending it with, "Play taps for Private Krugman." I agree! As for the terministic screens...
Forbes.com
OP/ED
Much Bigger Than The Shutdown: Niall Ferguson's Public Flogging Of Paul Krugman
By Ralph Benko
10/21/2013 @ 8:00AM 
While America was distracted by the theatrics of the government shutdown and threat of default something of much greater importance occurred.  
Niall Ferguson undertook a public flogging of Paul Krugman.
Krugman’s horns now forever will show under his dislodged faux halo. For this the world will prove a safer, and much more decent, place.
Read the rest at:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2013/10/21/much-bigger-than-the-shutdown-niall-fergusons-public-flogging-of-paul-krugman/

Three months earlier, there was this:

Forbes.com
OP/ED 
If Paul Krugman Didn't Exist, Republicans Would Have To Invent Him
By Ralph Benko
7/22/2013 @ 8:00AM
Paul Krugman makes for an unparalleled intellectual foil. If he didn’t exist we’d have to invent him. Recently he has been vintage Krugman, slinging derp. 
“Derp” is new slang, or perhaps jargon, with which to ridicule opponents. It is making its wayamong the left wing hipsters, blogsters, and twitsters.
Read the rest of the essay at:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2013/07/22/if-paul-krugman-didnt-exist-republicans-would-have-to-invent-him/

More Ralph Benko:
@TheWebster https://twitter.com/TheWebster
http://thegoldstandardnow.org/

Friday, June 7, 2013

Digital dragnets, the power of Twitter at Taksim Square, and the power of @davidfrum's tweets; Frum once again shows how much more insightful he is than others, here, pointing out how disconnected President Obama is from reality when he writes, "Incredibly, President Obama asks this question despite having two teenagers of his own"; The Guardian's bombshell revelation about domestic spying is only the tip of the iceberg

The Guardian
NSA taps in to systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and others, secret files reveal
• Top secret PRISM program claims direct access to servers of firms including Google, Facebook and Apple
• Companies deny any knowledge of program in operation since 2007
By Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill
6 June 2013 



Sure, because what could possibly go wrong with tens of millions of teenagers' personal information being recorded and stored digitally somewhere on school property, and likely being easily accessible by all sorts of computer-savvy creeps, whether there at the school or many hundreds or thousands of miles away?

WSJDigitalNetwork YouTube Channel video: Does the NSA Know More About You Than Google? -WJS's Best of the Web Today columnist James Taranto on Verizon's cooperation in handing over metadata to the federal govt. Uploaded June 6, 2013.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A5yLOwX320

The Obama administration is secretly carrying out a domestic surveillance program under which it is collecting business communications records involving Americans under a hotly debated section of the Patriot Act, according to a highly classified court order disclosed on Wednesday night.
The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in April, directs a Verizon Communications subsidiary, Verizon Business Network Services, to turn over 'on an ongoing daily basis' to the National Security Agency all call logs 'between the United States and abroad' or 'wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.


New York Times
EDITORIAL: President Obama’s Dragnet
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
JUNE 6, 2013
Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.
Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism -especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.
Read the rest of the editorial at:

See also:

Fox News Channel video: Obama administration pushes back on NSA document leaks 
Published June 07, 2013












I'm curious if any Miami or FTL-based federal officials have a similar M.O. to avoid compliance. Not that the local news media will investigate this unless a local federal employee comes forward to say so.


Monday, February 18, 2013

We applaud TheWrap's Sharon Waxman for adroitly performing a LIVE autopsy on curious recent Washington Post and N.Y. Times moves -WaPo booting Ombudsman position while NYT's "T" Mag curiously goes into a Time Machine and then bows and genuflects to NY society grande dame Lee Radziwill

We applaud TheWrap's Sharon Waxman for adroitly performing a LIVE autopsy on curious recent Washington Post and N.Y. Times moves -WaPo booting Ombudsman position while NYT's "T" Mag curiously goes into a Time Machine and then bows and genuflects to NY society grande dame Lee Radziwill 
TheWrap
WaxWord blog
Washington Post May Cut Ombudsman; New York Times Shills for Lee Radziwill
By Sharon Waxman
Published: February 17, 2013 @ 3:52 pm
The Washington Post is about to cut its ombudsman, according to its ombudsman.
In the latest, lamentable sign of the diminishing of America’s great daily newspapers, Patrick Pexton wrote this weekend that he is likely to be the last reader representative for the paper when his two-year term ends on Feb. 28.
Read the rest of the column at


Beware the Ghosts of Carrie Donovan! 
Democratic on their voter's registration card, yes, but baronial in their tastes -who said the class system was dead in New York?

New York magazine
The Cut blog
Deborah Needleman Puts Lee Radziwill on Her Debut T Cover
By Charlotte Cowles and Jenni Avin
Posted February 7, 2013 at 9:57 a.m.

Speaking of Lee Radziwill, at a joint press conference today, Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Col. Robert R. McCormick announced...

See also:
Valentine’s Day Bloodbath: WaPo Lays Off Workers in Hush-Hush Manner
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/washington-post-layoffs-valentines-day_b96626

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