Good morning everybody – hope y'all had a good weekend.
As much as I want to promote Ybor City (the home of CL and where I reside personally) as a place to be on a Saturday night, I have to say after being out and about in the entertainment district this weekend it decidedly wasn't. No editorial comment, just the facts. It seems folks in Tampa who want to have a good time hang out in SoHo, or better yet, downtown St. Pete.
Speaking of downtown St. Pete, the little Chillounge event put on down there Saturday night in Straub Park had an interesting moment when over a dozen Occupy St. Pete members crashed the party. We've got a first-hand report that we hope to have posted later today describing what happened there.
The big political news to start the week is how (surprise!) the special congressional supercommittee is going to announce today that they have not come up with a compromise plan to cut the deficit, as they were charged to do in the bill that helped pass the debt ceiling issue in the summer. Now supposedly there will be "draconian" cuts to defense, but as one D.C. insider said yesterday, that probably won't ever happen.
Meanwhile, while reporters pump up the fact that Newt Gingrich is suddenly a player in the GOP presidential sweepstakes, they conveniently ignore the fact that Ron Paul is as well. The Texas Congressman is right up there in the polls in Iowa, which goes first in this race to the White House, beginning in six weeks from tomorrow.
And on Friday, we were up at the USF Tampa campus to watch student activists and student government leaders come together on the nature of the activists complaints about tuition hikes – it's the Legislature's fault!
This article appears in Nov 17-23, 2011.