Ben Kirby - page 6

What goes around comes around. I was there for the government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996. The reasons for the shutdown then were a bit different, but many of the results were the same. From November 14 through 19 of 1995, I and tens of thousands of other DC-based federal employees went home. We did it again on December 16, 1995 through January 6, 1996, a grand total of 28 days. Though I was nothing more than a staff assistant and scheduler,…

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Over at the essential Beltway insider publication The Hill, sixteen of the eighteen front page headlines are about either the looming government shutdown or the shutdown as it relates to the Affordable Care Act. Only two have nothing to do with the politics of the next twenty-four or forty-eight hours. One concerns Syria and chemical weapons. The other amounts to an almost goofy footnote in what may well be the earliest days of Obama’s biggest foreign policy victory yet —…

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It almost seems like an accidental endorsement, if there is such a thing: Florida Governor Rick Scott officially endorsed Bill Foster for Mayor. “Absolutely. Mayor Foster has done a great job… He’s done a great job.” Pressed further to say if he will campaign with Foster in the coming weeks, Scott said: “The mayor’s done a great job. I’m here all the time.” It is praise that might feel a lot higher if the governor’s approval rating weren’t in the…

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I am a fairly liberal Democrat, so you won’t find a lot of agreement between me and the senior state Senator from Pinellas County, Jack Latvala, a Republican. I don’t like a lot of what Latvala stands for. If he had even an inkling of who I am, I have every confidence he’d say the same thing. But I have sort of mentally branded Latvala with a special mark afforded far too few Republicans these days. It indicates he is…

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Being the house liberal at SaintPetersBlog, it’s not always easy for me to concede when Republicans do things better than Democrats. But there is simply no denying that Senator Marco Rubio has a top-shelf message machine. There’s a reason excited speculation in conservative circles around his presidential ambitions continues to bubble up, though pointedly less so after the immigration battles. Indeed, the new nom du jour among Republicans seeking a savior to lead them out of the Tea Party-muddled wilderness…

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On Monday, the breaking news from downtown St. Petersburg set my heart racing. The Tampa Bay Times headline of the Kameel Stanley piece after the fact said it all: Ax-wielding man shot by St. Pete police had been institutionalized — and released — seven times. We have lost something in this country when a man can be institutionalized seven times, released, and still find his way to a firefighter’s ax, using it to chase terrified citizens before being shot dead…

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It is easy — too easy — to forget Councilman Jim Kennedy’s importance within the fourth largest city in Florida, because Kennedy dives so deeply, so quickly, so effortlessly into the weeds of policy that you might mistake him for the city administrator, or even a cubicle-bound middle manager.   Too often with elected officials, the aura of grand importance, of statut d’élite, of political privilege (albeit bestowed by the people) precedes the discussion of the gritty policy issues that…

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