Welcome back to the working week, everybody. I hope you all had a great three-day weekend, whether you stayed in town or got away for a few days.
Among the fun things I did this weekend was check out a few movies. I'd give a relatively subdued thumbs up for the Dennis Quaid drama At Any Price about pressures on modern farmers in Iowa, mediocre marks for the latest Star Trek project, and definitely an A grade for Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra, supposedly the auteur's last film before heading off to self-imposed exile from cinema at the tender age of 50.
But it wasn't all fun and games over the weekend. We did catch Bob Dole on Face The Nation become the latest Republican to say that people like himself and GOP icons like Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon would have a hard time getting elected in a Republican primary election these days, which brings us to Marco Rubio.
Byron York in the Washington Examiner called a few influential Iowa Republicans over the past week to get their (very early) views on who they're thinking of supporting for the 2016 GOP nomination for president. One thing he learned from these particular Republicans is that they don't think too highly of Marco Rubio's work to pass a comprehensive immigration bill (one supposedly influential blogger tells York that Rubio has become a somewhat "polarizing" figure there).
Although we've written extensively about how high ranking Republicans and conservative strategists believe such reform is crucial to making the party a viable option for Latino voters, how much of that has sunken down to the grassroots GOP primary voters? Again, Rubio is having to do this very complex dance with such voters, twisting into some extreme positions popular with the base to keep himself viable for 2016 (such as voting against the Women Against Violence Act and now calling for Republicans to not go to conference on budget discussions with the Democrats).
Although it's not everyday in the Tampa Bay area that hundreds of people in both Tampa and St. Pete hold protests of several hundred people united on an issue, the powers that be at both the Times and the Tribune didn't find it necessary to send a reporter to the March Against Monsanto rallies in both cities on Saturday. Thank goodness CL was there.
And it's now basically summer, which means that we'll start drilling down on the races for elective office in St. Petersburg. On Friday we posted a story on comments made by mayoral candidate Rick Kriseman.
This article appears in May 23-29, 2013.