Author: Trish

Tomorrow’s the big day for Katherine Harris. She’ll announce her candidacy for United States Senate at the Sarasota Boys and Girls Club, then embark on a whirlwind, 10-city “listening” tour. And in true Republican style, Harris plans to listen to only the right folks.

Miami Herald:

“Our tour will be a very special time for me and my family [Harris said] as we look forward to sharing these moments with friends and supporters throughout our state.”

It’s not just a Repug love-in, however. Oh no, Harris is about so much more.

“I look forward to spending time in every county listening to Floridians’ concerns, as well as their dreams for a better tomorrow. So much more can be accomplished for our great state. This race is about our citizens and their needs and what we can achieve together for a stronger state.”

Call me picky, but there are 67 counties in Florida, not 10. And a person can only hold citizenship from a country, not a state. Maybe she meant to say, “residents of Florida.” And probably she meant to say, “what we can achieve together that makes me richer.”

Painting a picture of a Florida that needs Harris to rescue it is revolting. Bill Nelson has worked hard and well for Florida and Harris is far from his equal. Maybe that’s why the Republicans tried so hard to get Speaker of the Florida House Allan Bense to run instead. Even they know Harris is a joke.

Michael Schiavo was recently noted for doing the right thing and honoring his wife’s wishes. The Southwest Florida Herald Tribune:

Michael Schiavo, 42, was given the Guardian of the Year Award by the Florida State Guardianship Association on Friday, just months after Terri Schiavo died…

“As you know,” Michael Schiavo said as he accepted the award, “I’m not much of a speechmaker. I don’t talk much. But on behalf of my wife Theresa, I thank you.”

Brother Paul O’Donnell, a Franciscan friar who serves as the Schindler family spokesman, criticized the award, calling it “offensive.”

Most group members are appointed by judges to represent people who have been officially deemed incapacitated. They said Michael Schiavo was a controversial choice, but they decided to honor him because of his commitment to honoring what he says was his wife’s wish to not be kept alive artificially.

“We see a lot of situations where family steps away,” said association President-elect Michelle Kenney. “He stuck by. He didn’t walk away.”

The St. Petersburg Times did an excellent job of asking the right questions about the Miami Herald’s firing of a reporter linked to the suicide, in the Herald’s lobby, of a Miami politician.

The year was 1987, the politician was Gary Hart, and the reporter was Tom Fiedler. After the Colorado senator denied rumors of womanizing and invited reporters to watch him, Fielder got a tip, staked out Hart’s Washington townhouse and found him there with another woman.

The story derailed Hart’s presidential hopes and ignited a national debate over how far journalists should go in covering politicians’ private lives.

Fiedler, now the executive editor of the Herald, finds himself at the center of a new ethical firestorm after firing Jim DeFede, the paper’s hard-hitting local columnist. DeFede lost his job for taping a phone conversation with a Miami politician, Arthur Teele, shortly before Teele killed himself in the newspaper’s lobby on July 27.

More than 500 reporters and editors around the country, including nearly 200 current or former Herald employees, have signed a petition protesting the firing.

Fiedler and the Herald’s publisher jointly fired DeFede late on a chaotic night, a few hours after Teele’s suicide. DeFede lost his job even though he disclosed the taping and admitted his mistake.

“To me, it has the smell of corporate panic about it,” said Carl Hiaasen, a Herald columnist and novelist. “I think there’s a lot of very serious resentment at the newspaper, and I think the scars are going to take a long time to heal.”

Read the rest yourself, but I do recommend such a reading. Great editorial, especially in light of some of journalism’s deserved criticism lately.

Yesterday was not Bob Novak’s first raging outburst. From Vanity Fair comes this interesting tidbit:

On the afternoon of last year’s New Hampshire primary, Robert Novak was in the Merrimack Diner in Manchester broadcasting a segment of Crossfire. It was a garden-variety event for Novak, then on his 12th presidential campaign and his umpteenth edition of CNN’s gabfest, until a local man, furious with Novak for outing a covert C.I.A. agent in his syndicated column, started shouting at him during a commercial break. “You’re a traitor!” he shrieked. “You’re a traitor!” The man was hushed up, the program resumed, and Novak talked more politics.

But afterward, as Novak made his way to the CNN bus, his tormentor followed, taunted him some more, and allegedly shoved him from behind. Novak, a short septuagenarian whose three-piece suits hide a considerable gut, grabbed the much larger man by the arm and gave him a shove back, sending him sprawling. Then he prepared for more serious skirmishing. “Novak looked like a little caged animal, fist locked and cocked back,” an unsympathetic observer later wrote, “like a garden troll gone insane.” Before he could take another swing, his Crossfire counterpart Paul Begala dragged him away.

Another Crossfire colleague, Tucker Carlson, watched it all in amazement. When Carlson joined the program, in 1999, Novak had received him frostily. To him, Carlson was an arriviste and a wimp, someone of insufficient conservative ardor and experience. For a time, the two barely spoke. But that wintry night in New England, Novak won Carlson over. “He decked a guy 20 years younger, and I have to say, I respected that,” Carlson recalls. “I thought it was such a ballsy thing to do. It’s the reason he’s stuck around so long and been so productive: he’s a tough guy. There was something admirable—something not of my generation—about it.”

For sheer entertainment value, it’s hard to beat Katherine Harris. Now the future Florida senate candidate and partisan icon is claiming she was a victim of the liberal media in 2000.

She doesn’t wear clown make-up in real life, she said.

On Monday, on a conservative radio talk show, Harris, now a congresswoman from Longboat Key running for the U.S. Senate, hit back, blaming newspapers for the criticism and charging that some – without saying which – altered her photographs.

“I’m actually very sensitive about those things, and it’s personally painful,” Harris said when host Sean Hannity asked about her image problems from 2000.

“But they’re outrageously false, No. 1, and No. 2, you know, whenever they made fun of my makeup, it was because the newspapers colorized my photograph,” Harris said.

She didn’t explain what she meant by “colorized.”

Asked Tuesday to point to an altered photograph, Harris and her staff could not.

The main hole in her conspiracy theory is that she was also shown on T.V. — live, up close and personal.

Some political experts say Harris’ charge makes little sense because most Americans got their visual image of Harris from television.

At least two Harris news conferences in November 2000, detailing her decision to enforce a deadline and forbid recount results, got national TV coverage.

“Of course it wasn’t newspapers, it was television,” said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. “I can remember watching her and thinking she learned all the wrong makeup lessons from Al Gore in the debates.”

I do agree that Harris took more criticism for her looks than a man would — say a man with a bad toupee or comb-over (paging Donald Trump). I also feel more favorable toward her for at least showing the good sense to state what the problem was.

“I haven’t worn blue eye shadow since the seventh grade when I was in the Girl Scouts.”