Alan Grayson with the old coat hanger trick

According to Scott Maxwell's blog...

The Democratic primary for the 8th District is getting intense, if not nasty. Alan Grayson(a.k.a.Harry Blackstone Jr.) has some hard-hitting mailers going out there ... one of which bashes Charlie Stuart for being anti-abortion -- and then features a coat hanger as the future for women if he gets into office. I can't help but think that's a little too intense for most people.

Plus...Grayson uses creative license

8th District congressional candidate Alan Grayson is apparently hard up for endorsements, because he's taken to bastardizing quotes, making them into something they're not -- at least in my case.

His campaign recently sent out an e-mail blast that quoted me as saying: “Grayson is the only Dem in the race!”

Now first of all, I'm not one to use exclamation points very often. (Or ALL CAPS, for that matter ... except for one time a couple of months ago when I wanted to share with Rich Crotty and Buddy Dyer one tiny little detail that I figured both men must not have been aware of when they proposed spending a quarter-billion dollars on the Citrus Bowl: "WE DON'T HAVE A FOOTBALL TEAM!" I stand by that excessive punctuation. But I digress.)

What Grayson's campaign creatively did was lop off the first half of my sentence, which said in a column earlier this month: "For many casual voters, Grayson is the only Dem in the race." And that was referring to the fact that Grayson's main Democratic opponent, Charlie Stuart, was not yet on the air with his ads. So the casual voters weren't aware of him at the time. Well, Stuart is on the air now -- in higher-profile spots than Grayson, in fact. And with a much higher-profile endorsement ... that of Bob Graham.