The Washington Post joins its GOP presidential forum partner, Univision, rehashing a 2011 narco-by-association smear of Marco Rubio.
Florida


On Friday's Real Time on HBO, host Bill Maher aimed venom at a number of conservative public figures as he referred to Uncle Ben's rice in a racially tinged joke about Dr. Ben Carson, and asserted that it is President Reagan's fault that many middle aged white Americans have personal problems that lead them to drunkenness, heroin addiction, and early death, as the HBO host tagged them "Trump voters."
During Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate on CNBC, Senator Marco Rubio (Fl.) excoriated the Florida newspaper The Sun-Sentinel and debate co-moderator Carl Quintanilla for raising questions about his young age and calls for him to resign from the Senate due to missed votes as examples of “a double standard” and “bias that exists in the American media today.”
Before disgruntled mailman Doug Hughes violated Washington D.C. airspace by landing his one-man gyrocopter on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, he sat down for a lengthy interview with the Tampa Bay Times and described in detail his plan to perform the dangerous stunt.

In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry infamously stated, in connection with an Iraq War spending resolution, that "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."
Democratic Congresswoman Corrine Brown of Florida has done her own John Kerry imitation. She was against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress earlier this week, and expressed her disapproval by boycotting it. But in a press release issued shortly after that speech, she effusively praised it. The Tampa Bay Tribune's Alex Leary noted the breathtaking switcheroo on Tuesday. The rest of the establishment press has been utterly uninterested. There's even more to this story, as will be seen after the jump.

Politico magazine wrote a nasty anti-Bush article by Michael Kruse, who used to be a political reporter at the Tampa Bay Times. The headline was “Jeb ‘Put Me Through Hell’: Michael Schiavo knows as well as anyone what Jeb Bush can do with executive power. He thinks you ought to know too.”
That's an odd spin for a man who fought for years to pull the feeding tube out of his own wife (and refused to grant custody of her to her parents) so he could get married to another woman. Kruse and Politico painted him as just an "average Joe" victimized by "hard-right" Catholic-convert governor.

Liberal reporters cannot believe conservatives see Jeb Bush as a Republican establishment figure, a moderate squish. Mark Levin calls him a “very good moderate Democrat.” In Politico magazine, NPR’s S.V. Date couldn’t believe it; neither could Adam C. Smith of the Tampa Bay Times.
Both journalists thought conservatives were just misunderstanding reality.

TVNewser's Mark Joyella spotlighted in a Wednesday post how MSNBC managing editor Ilyas Kirmanireacted with disgust to the reelection of the Sunshine State's attorney general, Republican Pam Bondi. Kirmani posted the word, "Gross," on a Facebook thread started by Miguel Fernandez, an executive producer at CBS's Miami affiliate, WFOR.
On Monday’s CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley, CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker opined during a roundtable discussion that Tuesday’s governor’s elections in Florida and Wisconsin featuring incumbent Republican Governors Rick Scott and Scott Walker (respectively) will be “a referendum on” the “policies” that the two have implemented in their states based on “the Republican playbook.” After mentioning that Scott is facing Democrat Charlie Crist (failing to mention Crist was both a former Governor and Republican) while Walker’s Democratic challenger is Mary Burke, Whitaker suggested that: “Now, both Scott and Walker have followed the Republican playbook on taxes, on abortion, on same-sex marriage, and tomorrow's kind of shaping up to be a referendum on those policies.”

All of the liberal media seem to be pushing the same agenda: overhype the “Fangate” controversy to their political advantage. On the October 16 episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart spent the first nine minutes of his half hour long Comedy Central time slot praising Governor Rick Scott for being the “pony” in the “horse s***” world” his very own President created. He called him "the hairless serpentine incumbent," and put his head on a snake.
CBS and NBC continued on Thursday night to harp on the so-called refusal of Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott to initially debate his opponent, Democrat and former Florida Governor Charlie Crist, on Wednesday because of Crist’s usage of a fan that broke the rules of the debate.
After each of the “big three” (ABC, CBS, and NBC) mentioned it on their morning newscasts, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News aired new segments and included NBC’s Brian Williams stating that what transpired on Wednesday night “may say more about the broken state of our politics these days than we'd like to admit.”

Attorneys for NBC News are feverishly working to get a judge to toss out a defamation lawsuit filed by George Zimmerman, claiming, oddly enough, that Mr. Zimmerman's prior work seeking to get justice for a homeless black man made him a "limited purpose" public figure. Nevermind that that's a side of Zimmerman's community involvement which the peacock network didn't really care to report as its skewed reporting suggested he was a racist.
From Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple's May 1 blog post (emphases mine):
