BOB LEVY HAS PASSED AWAY

Longtime political kingmaker (and Judge maker) Bob Levy has passed away. 

From the Herald:

Bob Levy, a fixture in Florida’s Capitol for four decades as a lobbyist for a wide array of causes, died Tuesday in Tallahassee. He was 67 and had been battling cancer.

A long-time resident of Miami Beach, Levy had deep political roots in Miami-Dade County and founded a successful lobbying firm, Robert M. Levy & Associates. He lobbied for a number of cities, including Homestead, Doral and Florida City. He built a cottage industry as a consultant for scores of Miami-Dade judicial candidates and mentored dozens of young lobbyists, many of whom are now elected officials or have successful lobbying practices of their own. He called them “Levites” and they were part of his “tribe.”

A skillful storyteller, Levy was known for gathering people on Sundays in Tallahassee for “family dinner.” He was a vodka aficionado — particularly fond of Ketel One — and he was the pioneer of Miami-Dade Days, an annual civic fly-in to Tallahassee. On that day each year he would don a big white apron and personally serve heaping bowls of paella to hungry guests in the Capitol courtyard.

Levy called Dade Days “a way of bringing a little bit of Miami to Tallahassee.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article71441502.html#storylink=cpy

STRINGS AND LEVY.

The other day we inquired about this gent Bob Levy. He has been mentioned of late in the comments section. He is apparently a political consultant much active in the judicial election fray.

We received this email (edited by Rumpole) in answer to our question:

Rumpole - the "thing" about Levy is that he is responsible for such bright minds as Peter Adrien, Barbara Areces, Sarah Zabel, Judy Rubenstein, Ana Pando and Will Thomas. In the last elective cycle he alienated himself from Al Lorenzo because Al found him to be too dishonest and too unethical. Now that is the pot calling the kettle black. Levy's influence over the judges throughout the system makes him the subject matter of this blog and any discussion regarding the administration of justice in Miami-Dade County.


Rumpole responds: putting aside the under-handed compliment about the above named Judges, we agree that political consultants who are hired by judges or judicial candidates are fodder for this blog. Lord knows one JA -cum-consultant made the pages of this blog last election cycle as frequently as Paris Hilton makes the pages of the National Enquirer.

The individual who left the above comment went on to write that Mr. Levy uses the familiar yet odious tactic of running individuals against Judges who do not hire him. Judges Adrien and Areces defeated very experienced judges. While both of these Judges are very pleasant to deal with on the bench, our limited experience leads us to conclude, in our own personal opinion, that the voters did not make the correct choice. Our own firm opinion is that the bench is not the place to get experience. It is the place to dispense justice based on experience. Ergo, a Judge who lacks experience cannot complete the equation.

However, the issue at hand is political consultants and whether they “threaten” judges to hire them, lest they run other candidates against them.

Having approved Mr. Levy as “blog worthy”, and despite the fact that Mr. Levy occupies one of the very small gaps of knowledge we have about any and all things, we invite comments on him, his profession, and the troubling topic of political consultants who make judges miserable. (hmm….perhaps we have overreacted. If someone makes a judge miserable, well, lets just say that cowpoke is drinking for free when we are around.)

1+2+3+4+5......

Speaking of threats, we are about to go to war with our own beloved Miami Herald.
For a few weeks we did not get our morning paper. The Times carried us through the tough spots, but who can live for more than a few weeks without Joan Fleishman telling us who is divorcing whom, and how much the attorneys are getting?

So we picked up the phone and made a call. And lo and behold, the morning paper arrived…and arrived. Now we were getting two a day.

Being greener than Al Gore, we began to fret about the harm to the environment our multiple papers were causing. So we fired off an email, and followed it up with a well placed phone call…and you guessed it- we started getting four a day. Now, living a few weeks without the damsel of dirt giving us the dish is one thing---but getting a daily dose of two national headlines interspersed with a hundred and ten pages of Burdine ads to the power of four, is quite another thing.

Sooooooo….account number in hand we asked (nicely) to speak with a supervisor.

Then, in broken Spanish, we demanded (not as nicely) to speak with a supervisor who spoke English, not that we had any trouble saying “No deseo cuatro heralds diarios” ….and…this past weekend, on Sunday…the big Herald Day….SIX PAPERS ARRIVED.

Now, luckily, our Herald delivery lad is not familiar with Fibonacci number sequences, or the entrance to our abode would soon be blocked with ads for Best Buy. But, and correct us if we are wrong, we sense a disturbing trend here. It may just be that the karma of the universe is equaling out our jibes at Judges Adrien and Areces. And it is the universe's role in this expanding mystery that has us worried.

M Theory in physics is currently attempting to account for the proposed "dualities" of string theory. M Theory has succeeded in "unifying" five superstring theories. And string theory proposes to unite the division between the large universe (General Relativity) and the super small universe (Quantum Mechanics).
This seemingly irreconcilable division occupied most of the rest of Albert Einstein's life after he proposed general and special relativity during his Annus Mirabilis .
[On a related topic, we believe Judges Slom and Blake are on their own "Einsteinan" quest to unite Circuit Court (large scale ineptitude ) and County Court (small scale ineptitude)]

Now here is what keeps us up at night: For String Theory to unite the two major prongs of cosmology, it must have strings that vibrate in at least ten separate dimensions. We can't even imagine the number of Heralds that are currently arriving at our doorstep in the other seven dimensions.

But we intend to do something about it.
Even if it means writing nicer comments about certain Judges.

See you in court, handing out the Herald.