Today on Context Florida:
Jac VerSteeg confesses he was delighted when he first saw the viral video of a woman berating Gov. Rick Scott and the Gainesville Starbucks. It was better than a movie, he says, because it was something much rarer. It was authentic. It was the underdog venting in real life. Then he found out it was Cara Jennings. When VerSteeg looked at the video again, he recognized Cara, whom he had interviewed several times as an editorial writer at The Palm Beach Post and she was a Lake Worth commissioner. Jennings is not the amateur, once-in-a-lifetime activist VerSteeg yearned for. She has been practicing, pretty much her whole life, to confront and annoy those in power.
Floridians have been swamped with dueling videos, says Julie Delegal. Video one depicts activist Cara Jennings yelling at Gov. Rick Scott, calling him a name, shaming him for being rich. Video two depicts Scott shooting back in an attack ad, insulting Jennings’ character, providing his stock answer for everything while skirting the issue at hand. Cue the banjos, Delegal notes.
As Jennings sat in Starbucks and berated Scott when he arrived to purchase a cup of coffee, Black Lives Matter activists did something similar at a rally where Bill Clinton spoke. Both incidents left Catherine Durkin Robinson and others in the trenches were left shaking their collective heads. Jennings and the BLM protesters had salient points and a rare opportunity to raise awareness. Both Jennings and the BLM protesters failed. Miserably.
Peter Schorsch proposes State Sen. Greg Evers may be becoming the Hamlet of the Florida Panhandle. Evers blew his own deadline on whether to enter the race to succeed retiring U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller in northwest Florida despite his flying to Washington last month to do “research.” Evers’ lack of decisiveness probably contributed to one potential candidate not running for his Senate district: State Rep. Clay Ingram, a Pensacola Republican, decided to run for one more term in the House instead. Meanwhile, Evers’ supporters privately fear his “enterprises of great pith and moment,” to quote the Bard, are “los(ing) the name of action.” With that, Schorsch presents the top five stories from Tallahassee this week.
