This is our regular feature where every day I do a post with the top 10 blog posts that I think people should read from the previous day. Posts are included here and ranked based on a combination of originality, focus on Florida, length (longer, more thorough analysis is better), quality of writing and impact of the story.
1. Pensito Review (Trish) – Why We Whine: Florida Taxpayers Sending Gov. and Fiancee on European Tour: “Life is just different if you’re a powerful Republican. Or his fiancee.”
2. Discourse.net – Miami Wakes Up to Political Normality (This is Good for Democrats): “David Rieff has a long piece in tomorrow’s NYT magazine about Cuban-American politics in Miami, provocatively titled, Will Little Havana Go Blue? The main conclusions track what those of us who live here see around us: Cuban-American politics are being changed by a generational shift (a rising generation that is American first and treats its hyphen much they way other ethnic groups do), and a political differences between recent immigrants and the revanchists who have been here 40-50 years. The recent escapees are much less willing to support policies that prevent them sending money to relatives left behind, and which limit their ability to visit their families still trapped in Cuba.”
3. Blast Off! – Prediction: Democratic landslide victory: “Perhaps I’m putting too much stock in anecdotal evidence. But it is nice to look forward to an election for once.”
4. Dan Gelber – Time Magazine Florida essay … the truth can hurt: “Today’s Time Magazine essay by Michael Grunwald (below) paints a painful (but pretty accurate) picture of the challenges facing our state. He touches most of the major trendlines that are contributing to our decline — and takes some pretty fair shots at the groups responsible for the dysfunction.”
5. FLA Politics – Charlie’s junket: “With all due respect, help us understand what Charlie Crist, his girlfriend and a cadre of RPOF campaign contributors will achieve trapsing around the sacred ground at Normandy? Not only that, this is already Charlie’s ‘third trade mission [read 'junket'] as governor.’”
6. Blast Off! – “G-U-N … see you real soon!”: “Yep, that’s the answer. Carry guns to work. I mean, having guns readily available to every rent-a-cop and soccer mom in America sure has kept the crime rate down …”
7. Blast Off! – Jim Naugle: merely an asshole, or the biggest asshole in politics?: “I’m not sure what the next item on the ‘gay agenda’ is (Jeebus, I hate that expression), but freakishly bigoted Fort Lauderdale mayor Jim Naugle (right) had a few words to say this morning to local hate radio station WFTL* about the possibility that his successor — he leaves office this year thanks to term limits — might be gay.”
8. Incertus (Brian) – Once more unto the Naugle: “Jim Naugle’s final term as Fort Lauderdale mayor feels like it’s never going to end.”
9. Florida Citizens for Science – Fish fossils close another gap in Evolutionary theory: “Some odd-looking 50 million-year-old fossils fish discovered in the bowels of several European museums help explain how flatfish such as flounder, sole and halibut developed the strange but useful trait of having both eyes on one side. The trait, in which flatfish lie on their sides at the bottom of the sea, has posed a problem for evolutionary biologists because no one had found any so-called transitional fossils, until now.”
10. Blast Off! – We get e-mail … from the mainstream corporate media: “Evidently my post yesterday evening about Fort Lauderdale’s batshit crazy mayor Jim Naugle struck a nerve with the folks at Hate-Talk 850 WFTL. Or at least one of them.”
