Author Archives: Kartik Krishnaiyer
Flashback: Editorial on gambling in Florida
With gaming once again on the front burner as legislative session began today, it’s critical Floridians understand the ramifications of any sort of expansion of gambling in the state. Some of the players have changed but the issues remain largely the same – thus we are rerunning an editorial which was published on the opening […]
What we are reading: Florida’s New Legislative Leaders Talk Issues, Personalities
Excellent feature from the AP’s Brendan Farrington. Many Democrats who haven’t dealt with the nuts and bolts of the legislature since the party fell out of power 20 years ago often forget that the legislature is defined by the personalities of its leaders as much as by partisan Republican considerations. This was the reality in the […]
March 7, 2000: Session kicks off with March on Tallahassee
Legislative session beginning on March 7 reminds me of 2000 – when as a staffer I had to get to the Capitol before 7 am as did everyone else working in the building because of a massive justified protest – that by Floridians against Governor Jeb Bush’s attempts to gut civil rights protections for African […]
The media failed to show same outrage about Rubio’s slanderous comments about President Obama as they did about Trump’s
The TV news media was in full frenzy all weekend rightly pilling on President Donald Trump (except for FOX News which in its role as “state television” booked guests that advocated the prosecution of President Obama after taking a pause Saturday morning no doubt to get on the same page as the White House) for […]
Trump’s Palm Beach visits causing problems for Floridians
Donald Trump’s weekend jaunts to Palm Beach are doing more than costing taxpayers monetarily – they are inconveniencing Floridians in some very basic ways. Take for instance the sonic boom heard two weeks ago in southeast Florida that shook up residents (including myself and my pets who went crazy thinking something had exploded in our […]
DOT tentatively awards JetBlue and Southwest new Florida-Mexico City flights
As part of the settlement to approve the Delta/AeroMexico joint venture, the two airlines have been forced to relinquish slots at Mexico City and New York’s JFK International Airport. With the divested Mexico City slots, the US DOT has made tentative awards to JetBlue to increase Fort Lauderdale and Orlando to/from Mexico City service from […]
Andrew Gillum sounds like a DEMOCRAT!
On paper, Andrew Gillum is the wrong candidate for a party that needs to shed it’s insider, elite image – why? Because Gillum has been working in politics and in elected office since he was in college. But the Mayor of Tallahassee deserves full marks for coming out of the box in his candidacy for […]
Is the DNC taking pages out of the Florida Democratic playbook?
Florida Democrats have patented how to lose elections, spin narratives internally to maintain some degree of control and make ideology all about the opposition to the other side rather than anything values based. Given the runaway success Florida Democrats have had in maintaining control of a weakened party and pushing business to consultants and campaign […]
Advocacy, fandom and the failure of objective journalism
Never has the media been more under the gun or scrutinized than today – the proliferation of advocacy blogs (like this one) as well as social media combined with the obsessive nature of 24-hour cable news channels has made media watchers and critics of us all. But it’s also turned us into cheerleaders and advocates […]
What we are reading: Rubio on skipping town halls: Activists will ‘heckle and scream at me
From Politico’s Marc Caputo, Senator Marco Rubio is unsurprisingly skipping doing town halls. In fairness, Rubio has been more accessible than most Florida-based GOP officeholders in the past but his failed Presidential campaign and the advent of the Trump era seems to have weakened his willingness to face his constituents.
The Florida Squeeze 