St. Petersburg Times: 9 to watch in 2009

Hello Everyone,

Evelyn here,

with two note worthy excerpts from today online addition of the St. Petersburg Times at Tampabay.com. The two excerpts are from the article 9 to watch in 2009 and are focused on the nine people and/or group of people more likely to be news worthy and/or have predicted events that will have a direct impact of us Floridians.

------------------

MICHELLE OBAMA

Mom-in-Chief

First black first lady? That's just the start.

Speculation has fixated on which of Michelle Obama's predecessors she will emulate. The soigne Mrs. Kennedy? She's certainly got the wardrobe for it. The hard-driving Mrs. Clinton? She certainly has enough Ivy League ed and real world cred to match.

But instead of retreading someone else's style, Mrs. Obama, the mother of daughters 10 and 7, seems determined to define her own role. She calls it "Mom-in-Chief."

The furor that this announcement provoked among working women — "How could you sell us out like that?" — and the smug response of the stay-at-homers — "You bet it's a full-time job" — only shows how crippling partisanship has infected the postpartum arena as well as the political.

Next year we will watch her model a new version of modern American womanhood. Neither trapped at home nor chained to a career, she will show families across America that women can shuttle between these realms on their own terms, without self-recrimination or cultural penalty.

That's worth a fist bump.

FLORIDA WORKER

Underutilized tool

Did you realize when we started 2008 that 4.6 percent of us were out of work? By year's end that number was 7.3 percent — over 10 percent if you live in Hernando County. Ten percent?! When was the last time that happened?

This stinks. We're begging on our knees for jobs at the landfill, giving serious thought to joining the military (sure, there's a couple of wars on, but the health plan is tops) and the only thing to be thankful for is that the gas is cheap while we drive around chasing work.

So is it crazy to predict that you, the Florida Worker, will be busy next year? Yeah, a little, at least for the first half of next year.

But a combination of President Obama's new deal money and the normal cycle of a recession should put many of us back to work before the year's out. (We sooo hope that's true.) You might be wearing a hard hat on a road project rather than a headset in a call center, but it'll be a job.

In the meantime, we'll all get a lesson in pulling together. That's something no government program can do.

9 to watch in 2009

------------------

Evelyn out.