Yep. Yr take on the Lopes tackle/thespian routine is exactly the way it looked to me (prior to hearing, here, that CP got a broken leg). What a jerk.

it's funny. I wondered, as I watched Bornstein getting torched time and again, and watched the pitiful hole his presence so obviously created in the defense...I wondered whether the apologists could possibly mount a defense once again about how serviceable this overmatched loser is, and how naive it is to point out that that bornstein fellow just isnt passable at this level. clearly, the 'leave jonny bornstein aloooooone' crowd remains alive and well. Bunch of dummies.

Good stuff. Grampy Dan the Holy Man's trying to play like he's a poor ol' Andy Griffith figure getting picked on by a sleazy politician....when the truth is nothing could get a person slimier than three decades of Tallahassee's dirty back room deals.

I'm pretty drastically underwhelmed by Sink. He'd have my attention, and if he makes a progressive case, he have my vote.

I'm pretty drastically underwhelmed by Sink. He'd have my attention, and if he makes a progressive case, he have my vote.

How'boutcha, Bud Chiles? How can you not hate a political party of a state w/ 18 or so million souls being unable to do any better than Meek and Sink? A child of parochial political privilege (who seems to be in this race as some resume building exercise more than as a real candidate), and a robotic technocrat/career corporate bankster, complete with her own lame, nepotistic bona fides. The best thing this state's politics has going for it is an active and progressive voter referenda culture, (and, just to go the 'full-Quixote,' a hope that through the ballot initiative, and on the heels of Fair Districts and Amendment 4's successes, we could push 'instant runoff' or some similar third party electoral reform?). Meh. Like I said, How'boutcha Bud Chiles?

Can't help but notice on GovTracker that Senator Sessions has chosen not to cosponsor the Grayson/Paul 'audit the Fed' bill in it's upper-house version. Shill.

Here's hoping the attack dogs can pull something out, because the blue team candidate sure can't. They should, and I suspect would, be hitting McFlanders across the christopath jaw with his neck-deep banking ties and water-carrying. But they can't, because some idiots in the party figured a former corporate bank exec would be a really neat choice to run for gubernatorial candidate. In the midst of a bank-driven economic/social catastrophe.

@Long Knives - Here's hoping yr right, brother. You gotta wonder if all this isn't too 'inside baseball' for Joe/Jane low-information-voter, though. I worry that a much more easily packaged message might be "Alex Sink, Corporate Banker". That would be a perverse way for things to play out, but I do think it's toweringly stupid for the party to have run a candidate, in THIS election cycle, with that for a resume. The GOP aren't the only ones who need to take a long look at who's pulling the levers behind the party curtain. For my money, this kind of thing is what gets at the root of the problem, in both parties' cases: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTxsCKCF3Rk

Looks like a sleep-deprived "dark period" going on all over Rubio's face here. Get that man a cup of coffee!

No kidding, Turtle. Politifact is a useful and innovative resource, but anyone who reads it quickly finds that the devil's in the details and sometimes the Politifact "scoring" can mislead. Never read one that was more hinky than this one. Second-worst, not not completely dead last, depending on what the meaning of "Southeast" is. Or isn't. Or something. Anyway, Scharockman's typed in three asterisks so apparently that means something.

It takes a very very rare kind of brilliance to pick a career banker to run for Governor, as the economy craters, overwhelmingly as a consequence of the "vampire squid" venality of...bankers. Struck me that way when first I heard of the Sink candidacy, and it's an impression that only deepens with time. In the Orlando Sentinel yesterday a GOP flack was quoted trying to draw an equivalence btw Grayson and the Coakley woman in MA. Alan Grayson stands to retain his seat precisely because he is so UNlike Coakley: in the primary, he ran against the Dem poohbahs' middling pick for the district 8 seat. And won. It's Florida progressives, not the teabagger wingnuts, who by all rights should be making third party noises.

Holy mackerel, does Buchanan need to have a cup of STFU. Absurd to read THIS joker spouting off about 'arrogance' and chang[ing] the way we do business" and the importance of "includ[ing] the...people". Never forget this guy came into his office by way of ballot rigging and reactionary judges. How very 'Dubya-esque'. To believe his election was legit, you have to swallow as plausible that more folks cast votes for a local hospital board than for the congressional race.

Ol' Bill Young: yet another GOP gummint-hater...who's spent his whole life drawing paychecks from the gummint. Young's website bio doesn't even mention what it was he "did" for a living before tucking into his 50 years in political office (wiki says it was the Natl Guard...more gummint paychecks). "Gummint can't run everything," but C. Dubya sure has had a long, cozy ride in it's 'smothering embrace'.

@ splat -- I think yr dead right, as far as confused anti-democrats (small-d) walking among us...and I think the even more pitiful card-check polling #'s highlight it even more. The rejection of the sort of "workplace democracy" that the US middle class -- and unionism itself -- desperately needs a big infusion of, that rejection shows a real lack of interest and lack of faith in taking responsibility for ones community at the citizen level. Real shame. FWIW, I think you can see folks on the right waking up to and owning their anti-democratic POV. you hear it in this "we're a republic, not a democracy" routine, just as you see it in the national out-of-power GOP essentially having closed up shop as a policymaking entity. And a Tea Party base playing w/ their dimwit counter-revolutionism. In the midst of major crisis (not a little of their making), the GOP "Goes Galt". If they can't be in charge, they're not playing, and so the Dems are killers and communists, and gummint shutdown takes the place of politics, and their voodoo economics that crashed the economy is the same medicine that'll make us well just you wait and see tax cuts uber alles Reagan Hallelujah Amen.

Sounds like more of the Jebbie goodness that put us in this shape. Exodus time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXnJVkEX8O4 "Neck deep in the Big Muddy...the big fool says to push on".

fwiw, Dean Baker: http://www.cepr.net/index.php/data-bytes/jobs-bytes/unemployment-edges-down/?utm_source=CEPR+feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cepr+%28CEPR%29&utm_content=Google+Reader "The drop in the unemployment rate was almost certainly attributable primarily to MEASUREMENT ERROR. The 10.2 percent figure for October, a jump of 0.4 percentage points from September, exaggerated the true unemployment rate, so the change in November was simply a correction of this sampling error. The employment rate (EPOP) remained unchanged at 58.5 percent."

It's the doing of that parlor pink, Sam Zell. And a Sentinel editorial board so far to the left of WorldNetDaily and Michelle Malkin.

Better than seventeen percent underemployment--and many more than that if you recall that 'discouraged' workers (on this point consider for instance that our neighbor to the south, Mexico, has something like 57% of its labor market falling into an 'informal sector' of street vendors, knife sharpeners, trash recyclers...), and short-timers in our jails & prisons are scrubbed clean from these data. This in November, the ramp-up month for our yearly national consumerist bingefest. The changed/changing structure of the economy is the story.

The Congressman from WorldNetDaily...working an "I'm as nuts as you people" campaign. http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2009/08/la-dunce-macabre.html Will he next signal his true WorldNet bona fides by calling for the Generals to launch an Argentine- or Chile-style coup? How classy would that be?

A thought experiment: had the Class Size voter referendum inlcuded language to the effect that, "when and if political leaders fail to comply with this very clear and concise voter mandate by its established reasonable deadline, the legal sanction of not less than fifteen years' imprisonment shall be handed down to all present and former State Education Commissioners and State Governors having held office in the period, post-referendum, relevant to the instituting of blah blah'--Were this language in place, would Eric Smith be singing a different song? I sure have a strong hunch. This is just middle-fingerism, just blatant 'go get yr own gummint' bad faith. The argument that money be allocated to the hiring of teachers is one that makes crisis-mitigation sense EVEN WITHOUT THE EXPLICIT VOTER MANDATE. it's just crazymaking, really.