We've always been fans of Barbara Peterson, the President of the First Amendment Foundation in Florida. Years ago we once enjoyed a class she taught at the Tampa Tribune facility on learning how to navigate Florida's Sunshine Laws, which has always been a rare beacon of progressivism in this relatively conservative, center-right state.
Which is why we're disappointed to learn that Peterson will be part of a session what is being called a Florida Transparency Summit on August 28 hosted by the James Madison Institute and will feature none other than disgraced conservative blogger/activist Andrew Breitbart (state Senate President and GOP CFO candidate Jeff Atwater has also been "invited," according to the blurb).
Breitbart has laid relatively low since the Shirley Sherrod incident a few weeks back. That's when the Matt Drudge acolyte embarrassed himself by highlighting a video excerpt from a speech by Shirley Sherrod, a black Agriculture Department official who appeared to be boasting about denying a white farmer governmenthelp. As we all learned an extremely short time later (less than 24 hours from when the tape was aired on Fox News), Sherrod's excerpt was taken out of context, as later in the same speech she spoke about how she helped that white farmer out, and transcended any racial bitterness she might have previously possessed.
This article appears in Aug 12-18, 2010.