When Joe Newman starts defending Social Security, he isn’t a neophyte on the issue. In fact, the 101-year-old candidate for Congress has been involved with the issue since the beginning. Newman was hired in 1937 to work in the Social Security Administration during its New Deal beginnings, looking at everything from funding mechanisms to long-term sustainability. That’s why he winces when someone in Washington asks if it would be better to privatize the system. “Are they so naïve as to think we didn’t look at that at the time?” a flabbergasted Newman rhetorically asks. Newman (as of press time) was running for Congress against Vern Buchanan as a write-in candidate, but acknowledged a full-scale campaign would be exhausting. The FDR progressive (no, really, he worked under Franklin Delano Roosevelt) hopes he can at least bring some insight into the conversation on the nation’s future. And he said he has answers to many of the questions people ask about the long-term viability of Social Security mostly because the same questions have been asked for the past 70 years.

Though the future of a plan to deal with homelessness in Sarasota County has always seemed tenuous only because the Sarasota City Commission has delivered a number of 3-2 votes on the issue, there were signs that more city officials seemed resolved, though certainly not enthusiastic, concerning plans for a come-as-you-are shelter within the city limits. Commissioner Willie Shaw at two consecutive meetings dabbled with supporting particular sites for a shelter. And while a site on Lime Avenue that he was ready to back fully ultimately was taken off the market by landowners for the purposes of a shelter, he seemed in April ready to move ahead with another pair of sites in town—almost. “I would want all of the issues with the sites to be explored thoroughly,” he says, noting particular concerns about the past uses of land under consideration on Osprey Avenue. While he ultimately still landed on the ‘nay’ side of a 3-2 motion  considering the sites because county officials want an accelerated timeline for getting the shelter running, many still saw Shaw’s gestures as a sign that the city would at least go along with any facility going forward.

Can a music video set policy? Former MTV videographer Rich Schineller tests the political power of the format with a new music video filmed on Siesta Key and intended to dissuade officials from dredging Big Pass. The “Big Pass Piano” video, which had racked up a few thousand views within two weeks of its release on YouTube, shows Maria Lane, a professional recording artist and Schineller’s niece, singing The Beatles’ “Let It Be” while playing a piano floating by the famous beach. “We’re just looking to raise awareness throughout the community for the potential risks and damage that could come,” says Schineller, who fears dredging the pass to re-nourish Lido Beach could lead to environmental damage that can’t be reversed. Will the film convince officials to back off the dredging idea? It has at least drawn a response already. After the video received media publicity, Sarasota’s city engineer Alex Davis Shaw sent a letter to SRQ that no final decision had yet been made. “It is vitally important to withhold judgment until the process is completed and the final reports are issued,” she wrote. “If the data in the final analysis shows that the proposed Lido Beach project would put Siesta Key beaches, homes or business at risk, neither the City of Sarasota staff nor the Army Corps of Engineers staff would support moving forward with it.”

A frequent complaint in past campaigns to create a strong mayor in Sarasota has been the injection of special interest dollars, but turns out this go-round the first outside money to be spent was done by opponents of the change. The International City/County Management Association donated $6,000 to The Citizens' Voice political committee, according to March financial disclosures. Officials from ICMA say they intentionally are getting into the fight early in hopes of stopping a proposed charter change from even making it onto the ballot this November. "We have a long history of being supportive to citizen groups opposed to strong mayor proposals in a number of communities,” says Michele Frisby, ICMA director of communications and public information. The move didn’t sit well with proponents of the strong mayor proposal, though. Linda Holland, chair of the It’s Time political committee, says her group has been accused regularly of not being made up of enough leaders who live in the city, yet opponents so far are being funded almost entirely with money from a group headquartered in Washington, D.C. "We're being accused of not being grassroots, and that we are not getting the real feel for the people in our community," Holland says.