Six questions for Florida’s November elections

Florida's Aug. 26 primary (as pathetic as the turnout was) set the stage for some high stakes races in the Nov. 4 election. Here are six questions I have about those contests.

Who is the worst, dirty, baby stealing scoundrel, Charlie Crist or Rick Scott?

The campaign ads have been 99 percent negative and we’ve only begun to see the tens of millions of political dollars hit the airwaves. Medicare fraudster! Job killer! Climate change denier! Flip flopper! It would be nice to hear more about their stances on the issues and their plans to address the state’s biggest problems. But hey, that wouldn’t be any fun.

What will happen first, the Miami Dolphins make the playoffs or Rick Scott directly answers a question from a reporter?

Google “Rick Scott evades questions” or “Rick Scott dodges questions” and you’ll get hundreds of thousands of hits, including this video on MSNBC. To use an X-Men analogy, he’s the Nightcrawler of answering questions. Poof, he’s gone. When he does reply, it’s often like he’s reciting a script and he’s ignoring the question. 

Could Crist be hauled in for an embarrassing deposition during campaign season?

Florida’s lawsuit against Digital Domain and the executives of the failed company aims to recover $20 million in taxpayer dollars, but Scott wouldn’t mind if it puts Crist in hot water as well. It was Crist’s bright idea when he was governor to award this unproven company taxpayer dollars up front when its finances were a mess. It’s likely Crist will be called for a deposition, and it would sure be a shame if that got picked up by the press.

Will stoners light up the ballot boxes?

The medical marijuana amendment has strong support in opinion polling, but the 60 percent vote it needs for passage is a high bar, pardon my pun. This measure might increase youth and liberal turnout, which is exactly what Crist and the Democrats are hoping for. Forget oranges, Florida is about to have a new cash crop.

Are gay marriage opponents in for a rude awakening?

Few issues have seen a rapid swing in public opinion like gay marriage, with polls showing that a majority of Floridians now support it. Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi  has aggressively battled every lawsuit seeking to legalize same-sex unions and she’s proud of it, issuing all kinds of press releases touting her stance. Democratic opponent George Sheldon would have the state drop its fight and support these unions. If supporters of same-sex marriage take out their frustrations on Bondi at the ballot box, she could be in trouble. Still, she has a huge fundraising advantage. 

Will incumbent members of Congress be punished for their slacker ways?

If you had any employee as unproductive as this Congress has been, I bet you’d fire their asses. In a world full of crises in need of urgent action, Congress bickers and stalls and bickers some more. Often times, people blame representatives in other districts, not their hometown hero. Yet, if this is a job evaluation based on “what have you done for me lately”, I see a lot of zeros on the board.

I’d ask a question about the races in the Florida Legislature, but those districts are gerrymandered so bad that most "contests" aren’t competitive. That last sentence could have been written 100 years ago.

Untimely death of Miami Dolphins stadium funding push lacks closure

Whichever side of the debate over public funding for the Miami Dolphins’ renovation of Sun Life Stadium you were on, the biggest frustration all sides can share is that the way the measure died left no closure on the issue.

That means the stadium won’t look like this:

Thousands of people had already cast their votes in a public referendum on taxpayer-support stadium renovations when the clock ran out on the accompanying state bill on Friday. It wasn’t voted down by the Legislature. Speaker Will Weatherford simply declined to bring it for a vote.

The immediate consequences are that Super Bowls 50 and 51 (no silly Roman numerals for me) are almost certainly going to San Francisco/Santa Clara and Houston. The long-term issue is whether Sun Life Stadium should get a major overhaul. It was built in 1987 and at some point it’ll outlive its usefulness unless hundreds of millions of dollars are invested in it.

Should taxpayers contribute to that renovation along with the billionaire owner of the Dolphins? Is attracting a handful of Super Bowls and college football championship games a good return on investment for the public? If the stadium referendum had gone to a referendum this month, up or down, the answers would have been delivered. 

Win and the Dolphins get the money with an endorsement from the public. 

Lose and owner Stephen Ross knows he can’t go that route, at least for many more years. So he’d have to accept the stadium the way it is, or go for a less ambitious renovation with private funding.

A partial roof wouldn’t motivate me to attend games anyway. I’ll stand in 90-degree heat or the rain to watch winning football.

Even a vote in the Florida House (the Senate passed it) would have brought more closure. It was telling that the opposition included many representatives from Miami-Dade County, which stood to benefit the most from the Super Bowls and other events the renovation aimed to attract. But we’ll never know whether it truly had enough support from elected officials.

The bottom line was that one man, Will Weatherford, blocked it. The speaker position changes on a regular basis. The Dolphins can try again when they have more friendly leaders in Tallahassee. The problem is they didn’t get an answer as to whether the public truly supports them.

In politics, as in football, there’s always next season.

Media screwed up big time on smear of Senator Menendez

In an age when an unproven accusation can spread like wildfire on the Internet, too many media outlets are guilty of repeating shoddy information that damages reputations. That’s what happened to New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez. 

It started when The Daily Caller, a conservative website, publicized a story shortly before election day citing confidential sources that the Democrat had sex parties with underage hookers after flying to the Dominican Republic on the private jet of a wealthy doctor. Never mind that the women and the man in the accusatory video weren’t identified and they offer no proof beyond their words (which later turned out worthless).

Then similar accusations were echoed by government watchdog the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, citing emails from a supposed “whistle blower” Peter Williams. Never mind that they didn’t meet Williams, or verify that he’d be in position to know such things about the senator. 

The story got picked up by mainstream media – nearly all national outlets and many local newspapers. Did these outlets talk to the supposed prostitutes? Did they verify the story from their own sources? No.

None of them explicitly said Menendez was guilty, but being accused of adultery, pedophilia and political corruption are damning labels. This had to hurt Menendez not just professionally, but in his personal life.

Now it turns out the story is BS. Police in the Dominican Republic say the supposed prostitutes in the video were paid to lie about the senator. They actually have never met him. Now the tone of the stories has shifted to “Who Framed Senator Bob Menendez” and “Official Seeks Mystery Man Linked to ‘Smear’of Senator Bob Menendez.”

Hello? Where was that self-righteousness at these same media outlets when they allowed themselves to be the mouthpieces of that smear campaign? 

Anyone can accuse people of horrible things, but that doesn’t mean the media has to repeat those allegations and drag people through the mud. That is especially true when the person making the accusation hides behind a wall of secrecy. The credibility of the source, and whether they’ll survive public scrutiny, must always be considered. 

 I’ve been told many shocking things about individuals and companies that I haven’t released in my paper. Why? Either because I couldn’t verify it, there was enough doubt in my mind that I didn’t feel reasonably certain it was true, the source had too much of an ax to grind for me to base my trust on them alone, or I felt that the accusation, while interesting, was too personal and not fit for a business audience. 

I know that my paper picks up stories from other outlets. I’m not comfortable quoting a story based on confidential sources that aren’t my own. That’s what the mainstream media did wrong with Senator Menendez’s case. They based their reporting on confidential sources The Daily Caller and CREW had, and even they apparently haven’t confirmed the identity of those sources. 

Who is that guy in the video with the hookers? We don’t know. But he looks trustworthy. Let’s take his word that this senator slept with them. 

And then they trusted emails to CREW, not directly to their media outlets, by a guy who may not even be using his real name. I get plenty of tips from anonymous emailers and, while I might follow up to verify them by other means, I’d never use them as a source in a story. Yet, these mainstream media outlets did that with second hand emails. That was terrible judgment.

Part of the problem is media peer pressure. One paper might be sitting on a story they aren’t sure of, then a competitor reports it with shoddy sourcing. All of a sudden, the first paper has to match them. And from there it spreads, true or not. Few have the courage to sit there with their arms crossed and refuse to publish a story they don’t believe in.

 

Of course, Senator Menendez has no real recourse for this smear campaign. If he could find the guy in the video who paid the girls to lie – and whoever set him up to it – he’d probably have a claim, but the media that irresponsibly picked up the shoddy story won’t pay for it. The libel laws allow you to saw pretty much anything about the public figure and, as long as you didn’t know it’s a total lie when you said it, they can can't do much about it. 

However, there is another price that the media pays, and we all pay it equally. It’s a loss of credibility.

What I would make Miami Art Museum do for $35M

What’s with all the bellyaching over Related Group’s Jorge Perez asking the Miami Art Museum to take on his name in exchange for a $35 million donation? A recent CBS4/Miami Herald poll found that 54 percent of local residents said it was a bad idea. I don’t think the new name, the Jorge M. Perez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County, is all that outrageous considering the amount of money he’s giving them. Is a little name change really too much to ask in exchange for a small fortune? 

Now if that was my donation, we’d be talking some major changes over there.

Not like I have $35 million to throw around, but if I did, the art museum would have to consent to my list of demands to get my cash. I’d insist on it being named The BRIAN BANDELL Museum of Super-Awesomeness (and art) of Miami. Yes, my name in all caps is part of the contract, thank you.

Now about those exhibits. If this museum is truly to reflect my monumental donation, then I want no less than 20 percent of the exhibits to be Bandell family portraits and pictures of me posing as scifi movie characters. And I’m not talking about the exhibits hidden behind the trash cans. I want prime wall real estate, with bullet proof glass, 24/7 security and eternal spotlights. 

Got a problem with that? Thirty-five million dollars.

What else does that buy? How about the right to make this museum truly super-awesome? I plan to turn over to the curator the following list of must-buy items that my donation shall procure:

-          The toy car that the late Ryan Dunn lodged in his anus in the movie Jackass.

-          The glass mirror that Lindsay Lohan snorted cocaine off of.

-          The stained Monica Lewinski dress.

-          Vials of fat liposuctioned from celebrities, with labels ie: Heidi Montag’s thighs.

-          The microphone Rick Perry used when he made his inspiring “I can’t remember” speech.

-          The blue speedo UFC fighter Dennis Hallman wore into the cage before getting his ass kicked.

-          A wax sculpture of Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf.

-          The rubber hand that wresting legend Mae Young “gave birth” to on WWE television after getting “impregnated” by Mark Henry.

-          A wall-spanning photo essay on the training regimen of Major League Eating’s superstars.

-          An entire wing dedicated to the passionate lovemaking of humpback whales.  

Now that’s a museum I would visit! It would be worth every penny, yes, all 3.5 billion of them. 

Compared to my list (albeit imaginary), I don’t think Perez is asking the museum for too much. After all, this is South Florida, where entire universities and hospitals are named after their biggest donors. 

On second thought, maybe I should donate my pretend $35 million to a university instead. Does the BRIAN BANDELL School of Sheer Genius have a nice ring to it?