Author: craigcrawford

Here are the two Clinton ads that appear to be exclusively airing in heavy rotation in the Central Florida market where I’ve been for a week. Have seen them run as much as twice each in a single half-hour local newscast. No Trump ads spotted so far. Social media videos, fun and games have their place but this is the heavy artillery:

from her Super PAC, PrioritiesUSA …

from the Clinton campaign …

Led by one who knows how — Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) — House Democrats, frustrated by the GOP’s refusal to allow votes on gun bills, staged a sit-in on the chamber floor.

NYT: House Democrats’ Gun-Control Sit-In Turns Into Chaotic Showdown With Republicans

House Democrats shout Paul Ryan down as he tries to stop sit-in

It’s become a national formula: Mass Shooting > Public Outrage > Anti-Gun Votes on Capitol Hill > NRA Says No = Nothing Happens (until the next killings re-boot the equation).

Will the deadliest of all machine-gun rampages in U.S. history yield a different outcome in Senate voting? University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato says that, still again, no version not approved by the NRA will make it.

Monday (6/20) Evening Update:
Senate votes down proposed measures

Here’s what was rejected (courtesy USA TODAY):

• An amendment by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would allow the attorney general to deny a gun sale to anyone if she has a “reasonable belief” — a lesser standard than “probable cause” — that the buyer was likely to engage in terrorism. The proposal is popularly known as the “no-fly, no-buy” amendment, but wouldn’t just apply to people on the “no fly” terrorist watch list.
• A Republican alternative by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, which would require that law enforcement be alerted when anyone on the terror watch list attempts to buy a weapon from a licensed dealer. If the buyer has been investigated for terrorism within the past five years, the attorney general could block a sale for up to three days while a court reviews the sale.
• An amendment by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, would make it more difficult to add mentally ill people to the background check database, giving people suspected of serious mental illness a process to challenge that determination.
• An amendment by Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., that would close the “gun show loophole” by requiring every gun purchaser to undergo a background check, and to expand the background check database.

Obama in Orlando (June 16, 2016)

A singer assassinated, the worst mass shooting in US history, and a gator kills a child, in less than a week — all in venues I am intimately familiar with. I am reeling from this. Flying there Saturday.

With the world’s eyes on Orlando,
let me tell you who we really are
By Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell:

As I wandered through the sea of TV trucks on Orange Avenue Tuesday, a strange sensation washed over me: That’s usually me.

I’m usually the one who parachutes into a community with a media badge to interview grieving families and document tales of ravaged lives. After hurricanes and wildfires. In the streets of New York after 9/11.

I’m usually the one wondering: Before the tragedy struck, what was this place really like?

Well, America, allow me to answer that about Orlando.

Let me to tell you who we are.

Yes, we are theme parks.

And yes, we are tacky. We are stucco mermaids and gift shops shaped like giant navel oranges.

But I have to be honest, America: That tackiness isn’t us. It’s you.

After all, we’re not the ones who crave three T-shirts for $5 or water-filled snow globes that say “Florida snowman.”

We are the place you want to come to escape your problems … well, unless you also want nudity and craps tables. Then you go to Vegas.

But far away from the parks — where hanging moss drips from live oaks and regal cypress trees stand guard (until we clear-cut them all to make way for strip malls) — most of us live in a different world.

And there — in walkable hipster neighborhoods and McMansion-filled suburbs — we are so much more.

We are artistic. Shakespeare and Tchaikovsky, Fringe Festival and Film Festival.

We are cutting-edge. With one of the best performing-arts centers in America, one the MLS’s most-popular soccer franchises and an NBA team that, at one point in time, knew what the post-season looked like.

We are foodies, flush with James Beard finalists with culinary hubs like the East End Market, which sits smack dab in the middle of one of those walkable neighborhoods I mentioned.

For all those non-theme-park reasons, the New York Times ranked Orlando as No. 13 last year on its list of “50 Places to Go” … right between Zimbabwe and St. Vincent.

If that all sounds incredibly sophisticated, well it is.

But it’s also misleading.

For here in Orlando, we are also poor.

We have some of the lowest wages of any major metro in America, thanks mainly to tourism attractions and hotel occupations that don’t pay living wages.

We have an economy built on the backs of people who scrub toilets on International Drive and have to take three bus transfers to do it.

For that reason, we are also a community in denial. We have grand dreams, but with wages that weigh us down like an anchor.

So we end up being a community full of dichotomies.

We are the opera and Philharmonic, yet also Lou Pearlman and the Backstreet Boys.

We are Park Avenue and Bithlo Speed World.

We are chateaubriand at the Waldorf Astoria and fried Oreos at the Central Florida Fair.

We are a melting pot.

By now, you know we have a lot of gay friends and neighbors. But if you’ve been left with the impression that they have to hide in nightclubs, you’ve been misled.

This city flies rainbow flags downtown. And more than 100,000 people attend our Pride parades around Lake Eola. One year, I rode on a float — and half the city council was riding on floats around me.

There are no closets here. Orlando is largely an oasis of open-minds and acceptance in a state that makes headlines for intolerance.

Diversity is one of Orlando’s hallmarks.

Yes, we’re “Latin” as you now know from “Latin night” at Pulse. But that’s an oversimplification. We are Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican and Dominican.

We’re Haitian and Asian.

We are South Carolinians and New Yorkers.

We are transplants.

It’s why we have a Vietnamese district on Colonial Drive and Mexican restaurants lining Semoran Boulevard; and why “pizza” means Chicago-style in one strip mall and New York-style in another.

Have I made it clear we have a lot of strip malls? Well, we do … though lately we’ve started gussying them up, adding pay-by-the-swipe wine bars and calling them “town centers.”

Oh, you know what else we are? We’re brave.

We have alligators, mosquitoes, hurricanes, sink holes, tornados, snakes and cockroaches the size of toy poodles.

We have a summer that starts in March, ends at Christmas and involves 280 percent humidity for much of that time.

We are evolving, getting beyond our citrus-field roots and theme-park mindset to become a place where people want to live.

And they do want to live here, America. In fact, they leave many of your cities to come join ours. Check out the Census data.

We are faith-filled. And we are generous.

Certainly we have faults. Lots of them. Maddening traffic. Underfunded education. And politicians who frequently require grand juries. I spend the better part of each year documenting all that.

But for the most part, we are diverse. And cultured. And aspiring to be more.

We are lots of things. But what happened in that nightclub on that one morning isn’t one of them.

That is not Orlando.