*Says it all: Monday’s Tampa Bay Times featured a classic (page-4) photo of Tropical Storm Debby doing Bayshore Boulevard. Four images were well framed: the top of the balustrade, a tow truck, a Mercury Capri and a kayaker. Where else but on Bayshore when it floods would you incongruously find a car and a kayak?
Note to adults: A flooded Bayshore is an understandable, cell-phone video allure. So also is the temptation for your kids to be kids and wade right in, oblivious to the backed-up sewer scenarios. Especially when they’re already in bathing suits. Of course, it’s really not safe. You don’t know what’s under their feet and swirling around their legs–other than bacteria.
* Some stories are just so compelling that it’s entirely likely that both the Times and the Tampa Tribune will accord them front-page, above-the-fold status. But in this case, they’re also a reminder of our priorities. Both papers went with assault charges being dropped against the Bucs’ thuggish Aqib Talib as front-page fodder last Tuesday. They then came back the next day with Armwood High, the avatar for football ineligibility, officially finding out what it had known for months–that it would be forfeiting a championship and lots of games.
* “That’s My Boy.” Imagine, Adam Sandler has been around long enough making awful, juvenile movies that he’s now playing the role of a father in one.
* Look who has resurrected his career after being so reviled not that long ago: erstwhile political consultant Steve Schmidt. He is, arguably, the one most responsible for imposing Sarah Palin on the 2008 GOP presidential ticket as well as on the American psyche. Now, thanks ironically in part to “Game Change,” the HBO movie about the McCain-Palin campaign, he has never been more sought after in that uniquely American hybrid of political-show business punditry. He’s a big shot with a big time public relations firm (Edelman) and is a regular, GOP-criticizing commentator on MSNBC.
And here’s his take, which dawned on him, he concedes, shortly after orchestrating the Palin selection: “She absolutely should not be president: no way, no how,” he recently noted. “I’ve watched her on the public stage over the past four years. There has been zero effort–zero–to improve any of her obvious deficiencies.”
But there’s a point totally missed when analyzing the re-emergence of Steve Schmidt, political guru. His job in 2008 was to find a possible “game changer” for a candidate who increasingly looked–and sounded–like an election loser. A candidate, ironically, whose campaign theme was “Country First.”
Schmidt was complicit in putting someone on the ticket who would have been that proverbial heartbeat away from the presidency. In this case, an office that would have been held by a septuagenarian with a history of cancer. That was an unpatriotic, hypocritical “Candidate First” calculation that blatantly ignored the best interest of this country. But it was a helluva career move.
* You know what was more disturbing than that Daily Caller website hack who recently interrupted the president’s prepared remarks? The conservative talking heads and bloggers who actually defended such disrespectfully arrogant behavior.